The Lightning Conductor Discovers America

								

It seems that Mamma and Larry made a runaway match, when he was twenty
and a half and Mamma seventeen and a quarter. He ran from college and
she ran from boarding-school. Mamma was an heiress; Larry was poor.
However, he had a lovely old house on Long Island (or rather his people
had it) and he came into it later when the others had kindly died: a
very historic old house, according to Miss Pat. She's intensely proud of
her parents' romance, and the fact that Larry is at this present time
only forty-one. "Of course forty-one is old," she explained to Jack
and me, "but not for the father of a grown-up girl, is it? It couldn't
be done younger! And when you meet him, you'll see--why, you'll see
that I look old enough to be his mother!"
(She had her nineteenth birthday with a present of a motor car to
celebrate it, just before leaving France, and she looks sixteen. So
naturally Jack and I are curious to behold Larry. If her description
fits, he must be rather like the father in Anstey's "Vice Versa.")
When Pat was ten, Mamma twenty-eight, and Father thirty-one, the trio
went to Europe, which I think mostly meant Paris. Mamma was taken with
pneumonia after an Embassy ball, at which she was the prettiest woman,
and died of her triumph. Larry didn't know what to do with the child.
But some sympathetic soul who wanted to save the dear boy trouble
advised him to plant his little flower in the soil of France, where he
could come once in a while to see how she grew. He took the advice, and
Patty was planted in a convent school, where she has stayed till now, as
he never seemed ready to dig her up.
Just what Larry has done with himself meanwhile is not explained in this
first chapter of the romance, which is as far as we have got. All Patty
knows is that he left "important business" to dash over twice and see
her: once when she was thirteen, once again three years later. He was
"too handsome for words," and "the girls were all wild about him." Since
then, nothing doing--except letters and cheques. Apparently Larry was
under the impression that once a schoolgirl, always a schoolgirl.
Anyhow, he put off indefinitely the happy day when he could take his
fair young daughter to reign over his home. The Mother Superior wrote
when Pat was going to be eighteen, and Larry said he would come, but
didn't. Patty is sure he couldn't, because "he adores her just as she
adores him," and is dying for the time when they can be together. At
last, owing to the war, all the older girls were leaving the school
except Patricia Moore; so Larry's memory had to be jogged, and this time
he opened his heart and sent for Pat. Dreadfully sorry he couldn't fetch
her himself, but gave carte blanche for everything a girl could
possibly want in travelling, except a father.
I told you about the high-powered French motor car. Well, there's an
even higher powered French maid. She's the kind that you could describe