CHAPTER I A RED-HAIRED GIRL The residence of Mr. Peter Pett , the well-known financier , on Riverside Drive is one of the leading eyesores of that breezy and expensive boulevard .
As you pass by in your limousine , or while enjoying ten cents worth of fresh air on top of a green omnibus , it jumps out and bites at you .
Architects , confronted with it , reel and throw up their hands defensively , and even the lay observer has a sense of shock .
The place resembles in almost equal proportions a cathedral , a suburban villa , a hotel and a Chinese pagoda .
Many of its windows are of stained glass , and above the porch stand two terra-cotta lions , considerably more repulsive even than the complacent animals which guard New York 's Public Library .
It is a house which is impossible to overlook : and it was probably for this reason that Mrs. Pett insisted on her husband buying it , for she was a woman who liked to be noticed .
Through the rich interior of this mansion Mr. Pett , its nominal proprietor , was wandering like a lost spirit .
The hour was about ten of a fine Sunday morning , but the Sabbath calm which was upon the house had not communicated itself to him .
There was a look of exasperation on his usually patient face , and a muttered oath , picked up no doubt on the godless Stock Exchange , escaped his lips .
" Darn it ! "
He was afflicted by a sense of the pathos of his position .
It was not as if he demanded much from life .
He asked but little here below .
At that moment all that he wanted was a quiet spot where he might read his Sunday paper in solitary peace , and he could not find one .
Intruders lurked behind every door .
The place was congested .
This sort of thing had been growing worse and worse ever since his marriage two years previously .
There was a strong literary virus in Mrs. Pett 's system .
She not only wrote voluminously herself -- the name Nesta Ford Pett is familiar to all lovers of sensational fiction -- but aimed at maintaining a salon .
Starting , in pursuance of this aim , with a single specimen , -- her nephew , Willie Partridge , who was working on a new explosive which would eventually revolutionise war -- she had gradually added to her collections , until now she gave shelter beneath her terra-cotta roof to no fewer than six young and unrecognised geniuses .
Six brilliant youths , mostly novelists who had not yet started and poets who were about to begin , cluttered up Mr. Pett 's rooms on this fair June morning , while he , clutching his Sunday paper , wandered about , finding , like the dove in Genesis , no rest .
It was at such times that he was almost inclined to envy his wife 's first husband , a business friend of his named Elmer Ford , who had perished suddenly of an apoplectic seizure : and the pity which he generally felt for the deceased tended to shift its focus .
Marriage had certainly complicated life for Mr. Pett , as it frequently does for the man who waits fifty years before trying it .
In addition to the geniuses , Mrs. Pett had brought with her to her new home her only son , Ogden , a fourteen-year-old boy of a singularly unloveable type .
Years of grown-up society and the absence of anything approaching discipline had given him a precocity on which the earnest efforts of a series of private tutors had expended themselves in vain .
They came , full of optimism and self-confidence , to retire after a brief interval , shattered by the boy 's stodgy resistance to education in any form or shape .
To Mr. Pett , never at his ease with boys , Ogden Ford was a constant irritant .
He disliked his stepson 's personality , and he more than suspected him of stealing his cigarettes .
It was an additional annoyance that he was fully aware of the impossibility of ever catching him at it .
Mr. Pett resumed his journey .
He had interrupted it for a moment to listen at the door of the morning-room , but , a remark in a high tenor voice about the essential Christianity of the poet Shelley filtering through the oak , he had moved on .
Silence from behind another door farther down the passage encouraged him to place his fingers on the handle , but a crashing chord from an unseen piano made him remove them swiftly .
He roamed on , and a few minutes later the process of elimination had brought him to what was technically his own private library -- a large , soothing room full of old books , of which his father had been a great collector .
Mr. Pett did not read old books himself , but he liked to be among them , and it is proof of his pessimism that he had not tried the library first .
To his depressed mind it had seemed hardly possible that there could be nobody there .
He stood outside the door , listening tensely .
He could hear nothing .
He went in , and for an instant experienced that ecstatic thrill which only comes to elderly gentlemen of solitary habit who in a house full of their juniors find themselves alone at last .
Then a voice spoke , shattering his dream of solitude .
" Hello , pop ! "
Ogden Ford was sprawling in a deep chair in the shadows .
" Come in , pop , come in .
Lots of room . "
Mr. Pett stood in the doorway , regarding his step-son with a sombre eye .
He resented the boy 's tone of easy patronage , all the harder to endure with philosophic calm at the present moment from the fact that the latter was lounging in his favourite chair .
Even from an aesthetic point of view the sight of the bulging child offended him .
Ogden Ford was round and blobby and looked overfed .
He had the plethoric habit of one to whom wholesome exercise is a stranger and the sallow complexion of the confirmed candy-fiend .
Even now , a bare half hour after breakfast , his jaws were moving with a rhythmical , champing motion .
" What are you eating , boy ? " demanded Mr. Pett , his disappointment turning to irritability .
" Candy . "
" I wish you would not eat candy all day . "
" Mother gave it to me , " said Ogden simply .
As he had anticipated , the shot silenced the enemy 's battery .
Mr. Pett grunted , but made no verbal comment .
Ogden celebrated his victory by putting another piece of candy in his mouth .
" Got a grouch this morning , have n't you , pop ? "
" I will not be spoken to like that ! "
" I thought you had , " said his step-son complacently .
" I can always tell .
I do n't see why you want to come picking on me , though .
I 've done nothing . "
Mr. Pett was sniffing suspiciously .
" You 've been smoking . "
" Me !! "
" Smoking cigarettes . "
" No , sir ! "
" There are two butts in the ash-tray . "
" I did n't put them there . "
" One of them is warm . "
" It 's a warm day . "
" You dropped it there when you heard me come in . "
" No , sir !
I 've only been here a few minutes .
I guess one of the fellows was in here before me .
They 're always swiping your coffin-nails .
You ought to do something about it , pop .
You ought to assert yourself . "
A sense of helplessness came upon Mr. Pett .
For the thousandth time he felt himself baffled by this calm , goggle-eyed boy who treated him with such supercilious coolness .
" You ought to be out in the open air this lovely morning , " he said feebly .
" All right .
Let 's go for a walk .
I will if you will . "
" I -- I have other things to do , " said Mr. Pett , recoiling from the prospect .
" Well , this fresh-air stuff is overrated anyway .
Where 's the sense of having a home if you do n't stop in it ? "
" When I was your age , I would have been out on a morning like this -- er -- bowling my hoop . "
" And look at you now ! "
" What do you mean ? "
" Martyr to lumbago . "
" I am not a martyr to lumbago , " said Mr. Pett , who was touchy on the subject .
" Have it your own way .
All I know is -- " " Never mind ! "
" I 'm only saying what mother . . . " " Be quiet ! "
Ogden made further researches in the candy box .
" Have some , pop ? "
" No . "
" Quite right .
Got to be careful at your age . "
" What do you mean ? "
" Getting on , you know .
Not so young as you used to be .
Come in , pop , if you 're coming in .
There 's a draft from that door . "
Mr. Pett retired , fermenting .
He wondered how another man would have handled this situation .
The ridiculous inconsistency of the human character infuriated him .
Why should he be a totally different man on Riverside Drive from the person he was in Pine Street ?
Why should he be able to hold his own in Pine Street with grown men -- whiskered , square-jawed financiers -- and yet be unable on Riverside Drive to eject a fourteen-year-old boy from an easy chair ?
It seemed to him sometimes that a curious paralysis of the will came over him out of business hours .
Meanwhile , he had still to find a place where he could read his Sunday paper .
He stood for a while in thought .
Then his brow cleared , and he began to mount the stairs .
Reaching the top floor , he walked along the passage and knocked on a door at the end of it .
From behind this door , as from behind those below , sounds proceeded , but this time they did not seem to discourage Mr. Pett .
It was the tapping of a typewriter that he heard , and he listened to it with an air of benevolent approval .
He loved to hear the sound of a typewriter : it made home so like the office .
" Come in , " called a girl 's voice .
The room in which Mr. Pett found himself was small but cosy , and its cosiness -- oddly , considering the sex of its owner -- had that peculiar quality which belongs as a rule to the dens of men .
A large bookcase almost covered one side of it , its reds and blues and browns smiling cheerfully at whoever entered .
The walls were hung with prints , judiciously chosen and arranged .
Through a window to the left , healthfully open at the bottom , the sun streamed in , bringing with it the pleasantly subdued whirring of automobiles out on the Drive .
At a desk at right angles to this window , her vivid red-gold hair rippling in the breeze from the river , sat the girl who had been working at the typewriter .
She turned as Mr. Pett entered , and smiled over her shoulder .