Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/284

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"George! Do come out and have a round of golf with us this afternoon."

And George would be laughingly contemptuous. "Knocking a pill round a pasture? Nope! Not today. Sorry, sweetheart, I've got something real to do."

Absorbed, content, oblivious—playing the greatest game he could conceive of, stroke by stroke, across his huge mahogany desk, he looked down in these days upon mere sport as the diversion of a child mind.

And Fay would be furiously angry and—then—tramping the links with another—Sir Brian, perhaps—would inevitably try to be charitable. "Dear old money-grabber!" she would sigh. But it was hardly to be wondered at if she grew jealous of the factory. "Sell it, George!" she appealed one day wistfully. "I am losing you. I can feel you slipping away from me every day. Sell it and get out so I can have you all to myself. I have so much more than enough for both of us, you know."

George was horrified. "But I can't get out, Fay," he tried to reason with her. "It isn't my money alone, you see. It's all the other fellows'. The stock has been sold and resold. The people who bought it didn't invest in shares in an automobile company. They took stock in me—in my reputation. You see, the whole big enterprise is pyramided on me. I've got to stay and