“Parrish?” he said eagerly.
The tall young man said “Yes, sir,” and was shaken by the hand.
“Jones?”
This was the young man with the black eyes and hair. He smiled back at Cyrus Girard and announced in a slightly southern accent that he was mighty glad to meet him.
“And so you must be Van Buren,” said Girard, turning to the third. Van Buren acknowledged as much. He was obviously from a large city—unflustered and very spick-and-span.
“Sit down,” said Girard, looking eagerly from one to the other. “I can’t tell you the pleasure of this minute.”
They all smiled nervously and sat down.
“Yes, sir,” went on the older man, “if I’d had any boys of my own I don’t know but what I’d have wanted them to look just like you three.” He saw that they were all growing pink, and he broke off with a laugh. “All right, I won’t embarrass you anymore. Tell me about the health of your respective fathers and we’ll get down to business.”
Their fathers, it seemed, were very well; they had all sent congratulatory messages by their sons for Mr. Girard’s sixtieth birthday.
“Thanks. Thanks. Now that’s over.” He leaned back suddenly in his chair. “Well, boys, here’s what I have to say. I’m retiring from business next year. I’ve always intended to retire at sixty, and my wife’s always counted on it, and the time’s come. I can’t put it off any longer. I haven’t any sons and I haven’t any nephews and I haven’t any cousins and I have a brother who’s fifty years old and in the same boat I am. He’ll perhaps hang on for ten years more down here; after that it looks as if the house, Cyrus Girard, Incorporated, would change its name.
“A month ago I wrote to the three best friends I had in college, the three best friends I ever had in my life, and asked them if they had any sons between twenty-five and thirty years old. I told them I had room for just one young man here in my business, but he had to be about the best in the market. And as all three of you arrived here this morning I guess your fathers think you are. There’s nothing complicated about my proposition. It’ll take me three months to find out what I want to know, and at the end of that time two of you’ll be disappointed; the other one can have about everything they used to give away in the fairy tales, half my kingdom and, if she wants him, my daughter’s hand.” He raised his head slightly. “Correct me, Lola, if I’ve said anything wrong.”
At these words the three young men started violently, looked behind them, and then jumped precipitately to their feet. Reclining lazily in an armchair not two yards away sat a gold-and-ivory little beauty with dark eyes and a moving, childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world. When she saw the startled expressions on their faces she gave vent to a suppressed chuckle in which the victims after a moment joined.
“This is my daughter,” said Cyrus Girard, smiling innocently. “Don’t be so alarmed. She has many suitors come from far and near—and all that sort of thing. Stop making these young men feel silly, Lola, and ask them if they’ll come to dinner with us tonight.”
Lola got to her feet gravely and her grey eyes fell on them one after another.
“I only know part of your names,” she said.
“Easily arranged,” said Van Buren. “Mine’s George.”
The tall young man bowed.
“I respond to John Hardwick Parrish,” he confessed, “or anything of that general sound.”
She turned to the dark-haired southerner, who had volunteered no information. “How about Mr. Jones?”
“Oh, just—Jones,” he answered uneasily.
She looked at him in surprise.
“Why, how partial!” she exclaimed, laughing. “How—I might even say how fragmentary.”
Mr. Jones looked around him in a frightened way.
“Well, I tell you,” he said finally, “I don’t guess my first name is much suited to this sort of thing.”
“What is it?”
“It’s Rip.”
“Rip!”
Eight eyes turned reproachfully upon him.
“Young man,” exclaimed Girard, “you don’t mean that my old friend in his senses named his son that!”
Jones shifted defiantly on his feet.
“No, he didn’t,” he admitted. “He named me Oswald.”
There was a ripple of sympathetic laughter.
“Now you four go along,” said Girard, sitting down at his desk. “Tomorrow at nine o’clock sharp you report to my general manager, Mr. Galt, and the tournament begins. Meanwhile if Lola has her coupé-sport-limousine-roadster-landaulet, or whatever she drives now, she’ll probably take you to your respective hotels.”
After they had gone Girard’s face grew restless again and he stared at nothing for a long time before he pressed the button that started the long-delayed stream of traffic through his mind.
“One of them’s sure to be all right,” he muttered, “but suppose it turned out to be the dark one. Rip Jones, Incorporated!”
II
As the three months drew to an end it began to appear that not one, but all of the young men were going to turn out all right. They were all industrious, they were all possessed of that mysterious ease known as personality and, moreover, they all had brains. If Parrish, the tall young man from the West, was a little the quicker in sizing up the market; if Jones, the southerner, was a bit the most impressive in his relations with customers, then Van Buren made up for it by spending his nights in the study of investment securities. Cyrus Girard’s mind was no sooner drawn to one of them by some exhibition of shrewdness or resourcefulness than a parallel talent appeared in one of the others. Instead of having to enforce upon himself a strict neutrality he found himself trying to concentrate upon the individual merits of first one and then another—but so far without success.
Every week-end they all came out to the Girard place at Tuxedo Park, where they fraternized a little self-consciously with the young and lovely Lola, and on Sunday mornings tactlessly defeated her father at golf. On the last tense week-end before the decision was to be made Cyrus Girard asked them to meet him in his study after dinner. On their respective merits as future partners in Cyrus Girard, Inc., he had been unable to decide, but his despair had evoked another plan, on which he intended to base his decision.
“Gentlemen,” he said, when they had convoked in his study at the appointed hour, “I have brought you here to tell you that you’re all fired.”
Immediately the three young men were on their feet, with shocked, reproachful expressions in their eyes.
“Temporarily,” he added, smiling good-humoredly. “So spare a decrepit old man your violence and sit down.”
They sat down, with short relieved smiles.
“I like you all,” he went on, “and I don’t know which one I like better than the others. In fact—this thing hasn’t come out right at all. So I’m going to extend the competition for two more weeks—but in an entirely different way.”
They all sat forward eagerly in their chairs.
“Now my generation,” he went on, “have made a failure of our leisure hours. We grew up in the most hard-boiled commercial age any country ever knew, and when we retire we never know what to do with the rest of our lives. Here I am, getting out at sixty, and miserable about it. I haven’t