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Those who beheld, and who, because of the wealth of the principal personages, took notice of the meeting between Fitz and his father, say that Fitz touched his father’s cheek with his lips as naturally and unaffectedly as if he had been three years old, that a handshake between the two men accompanied this salute, and that Williams senior was heard to remark that it had looked like rain early in the morning, but that now it didn’t, and that he had a couple of seats for the ball game. What he really said was inside, neither audible nor visible upon his smooth-shaven, care-wrinkled face. It was an outcry of the heart, so joyous as to resemble grief.

There was a young and pretty widow on that ship who had made much of Fitz on the way out and had pretended that she understood him. She thought that she had made an impression, and that, whatever happened, he would not forget her. But when he rushed up, his face all joyous, to say good-by, her heart sank. And she told her friends afterward that there was a certain irresistible, orphan-like appeal about that young Williams, and that she had felt like a mother toward him. But this was not till very much later. At first she used to shut herself up in her room and cry her eyes out.

They lunched at an uptown hotel and afterward, smoking big cigars, they drove to a hatter’s and bought straw hats, being very critical of each other’s fit and choice.

Then they hurried up to the Polo Grounds, and when it began to get exciting in the fifth inning, Fitz felt his father pressing something into his hand. Without taking his eyes from Wagsniff, who was at the bat, Fitz put that something into his mouth and began to chew. The two brothers–for that is the high relationship achieved sometimes in America, and in America alone, between father and son–thrust their new straw hats upon the backs of their round heads, humped themselves forward, and rested with their elbows on their knees and watched–no, that is your foreigner’s attitude toward a contest–they played the game.

I cannot leave them thus without telling the reader that they survived the almost fatal ninth, when, with the score 3-2 against, two out and a man on first, Wagsniff came once more to the bat and, swinging cunningly at the very first ball pitched to him by the famous Mr. Blatherton, lifted it over the centrefielder’s head and trotted around the bases and, grinning like a Hallowe’en pumpkin, came romping home.

At dinner that night Williams senior said suddenly:

“Fitz, what you do want to do?”

A stranger would have thought that Fitz was being asked to choose between a theatre and a roof-garden, but Fitz knew that an entirely different question was involved in those casually spoken words. He was being asked off-hand to state off-hand what he was going to do with his young life. But he had his answer waiting.

“I want to see the world,” he said.

Williams senior, as a rule, thought things out in his own mind and did not press for explanations. But on the present occasion he asked:

“As how?”

Fitz smiled very youthfully and winningly.

“I’ve seen some of it,” he said, “right side up. Now I want to have a look upside-down. If I go into something of yours–as myself–I don’t get a show. I’m marked. The other clerks would swipe to me, and the heads would credit me with brains before I showed whether I had any or not. I want you to get me a job in Wall Street–under any other name than my own–except Percy”–they both laughed–“your first name and mamma’s maiden name would do–James Holden. And nobody here knows me by sight, I’ve been abroad so much; and it seems to me I’d get an honest point of view and find out if I was any good or not, and if I could get myself liked for myself or not.”