He bustled all day and bubbled every evening. Vestal was pleased with his achievement and his advancement, and Biddy started a bank of her own, in which her cousin Ruby, Uncle Robert’s daughter, deposited six pins, the very first day, and Prince a damaged dog-biscuit. This bank came to no good, however, because Ruby, whose ethics were not up to Prutt banking standards, managed to withdraw eleven out of her six pins, and Biddy, after counsel from Uncle Oliver Beehouse, declared bankruptcy.

Mr. Prutt was cautious in his hopes for the Veterans’ Center, but Neil saw no limits to it, and late in April he went by train to St. Paul and Minneapolis, to consult bankers, state officials, and the heads of the American Legion and the other organizations of veterans.

* * * * *

As a banking expert, he took the chair-car Borup.

To the chronic globe-trotters of Grand Republic and Duluth, the Borup had for many years been an ambulatory home. It was so old that its familiars insisted it was not constructed of steel but of wood hardened by winter storms and the prairie July, when the thermometer goes to a hundred and ten. Its interior was decorated with inlaid woods, olive-green and rose and gray. It had been laid out with such pleasant irregularity that you might have known it for years before you opened a door and discovered another compartment with a table for card-players and four aged chairs covered with prickly green hair-shirting.

On the Borup Old Mr. Sparrock, Hiram Sparrock, Dr. Henry’s father, still alive though somewhat retired at ninety-four, keeps spare sets of his five pills and three tonics and two dentures, with a comb and a stick of mustache-brilliantine. Hiram, that genial old cut-throat who knew John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and Cecil Rhodes, still has, despite the properties he made over to his son, a million acres of land in the United States, and his holdings in Mexico are measured not by miles but by airplane time. It is generally believed in Grand Republic that Hiram is richer even than the Wargates or the Eisenherzes, but he invariably talks about his poverty, and he never gives Mac, the colored porter on the Borup, more than a quarter.

His son, Dr. Henry Sparrock, keeps on the Borup a Modern Library edition of Karl Marx, which for five years he has been trying to read, in the hope that he will find out “what all these leftwing congressmen and these radical labor leaders are up to,” but for five years an invitation to play bridge has always interrupted him just as he has started to read page two again.

And on the Borup, Madge Dedrick keeps her pack of monogrammed cards for solitaire, and Oliver Beehouse a crossword-puzzle book, and Diantha Marl a book on psycho-analysis, a book on etiquette, and a bottle of brandy.

Mac the porter, fat and very dark and nearly seventy and professionally genial, knows all of them. He shepherds the college-going daughters of couples whose wedding journey he remembers, and calls them “Miss,” even though all through younger years he has known them as “Toots” or “Kay.” He finds their lost compacts and candy-boxes, and tries to keep them from being too chummy with handsome strangers met on the train. He knows which husbands say farewell to which wives at one end of the run, and which husbands meet and kiss them at the other.