The Torchy Stories: reference groups

Put on the church door to check tickets, Torchy changes into his embarrassing formal clothes in the gallery and turns away gatecrashers.

A tall, oddly dressed stranger presents a valid ticket, and Torchy sees it is the bride's supposedly jailbird brother.

As Torchy is leaving for the dinner, an important visitor arrives asking for the friend and announces he is the new father-in-law, the senator.

Torchy refuses to reveal his friend's address until the senator promises peaceful intentions, then escorts him and his wife to the couple's cheap walk-up flat.

Tipped off by Mr. Robert, Torchy recognises a lanky country visitor who has been waiting since the building opened, and draws out one-word answers from him about his arrival.

The boss gruffly tells Torchy that two young wards of his are calling, and orders him to fit them in whenever they will be the least bother among his meetings.

The wards turn out older than expected: a serious young man and a quick, teasing young woman; told the boss is busy, they offer to leave, and Torchy insists they wait so he is not blamed.

Sensing a big battle brewing, Torchy is told by the boss to show in a certain Mr. Jones at once and then block all other callers; Torchy cheekily asks which Jones.

Torchy guesses the firm's interests are under threat; he opens the door slowly to watch, but the boss waves him out, and he teases the curious typists.

Torchy shows he knows the firm's files better than anyone as he answers the harried boss's son's questions; asked what to do with a waiting inventor, he says the fussy senior clerk would snub him, and is told to hear the man out himself, courteously.

Torchy politely draws out the man's by-product scheme, takes notes, promises a board decision in ten days and sees him off pleased, while the boss's son listens unnoticed and grins.

While Torchy is entertaining the boss's son's hearty sporting friend in the private office, a finicky, sharp-tongued young man arrives to meet the boss's son-in-law, who has forgotten the appointment.

An old-fashioned, ruddy gentleman storms into the private office and demands to know why the boss's son made him president of one of the firm's companies without asking.

In a jittery wartime market full of rumours about the firm, a group of nervous directors crowds Torchy's desk before nine demanding to see the old boss, and Torchy tells them bluntly to stop rocking the boat.

Torchy sees the secretary is currying favour with the heir to protect his own job; ordered to let no one through the gate, he trips up a confident young man who tries to walk straight in.

Torchy introduces an odd, gawky country visitor in earmuffs and an umbrella, who wanders in fumbling for the gate, and warns that trouble follows him everywhere.

Torchy mocks the confused visitor and nearly sends him away, before learning he has come a long way to see the boss's son, whom he calls his cousin.

The boss's son welcomes the cousin warmly and takes him to lunch, making Torchy fear he has been too cheeky; that evening the son gets a worrying telephone call.

Torchy takes a shabby man in work clothes for a window cleaner and tries to send him off; the man calmly insists he wants to see a high official, even the president.

The man, gaunt and sickly-looking, wants the company to bid on his option on some mineral lands; Torchy calls the private secretary, who dismisses him rudely on sight of his clothes.

Torchy knows the boss was made their guardian by a distant relative's will without being asked, and that he despises young people; suspecting the pair of angling for holiday treats, he plans to freeze them out.

The boss insists they spend the rest of the holidays at his house and orders the car; Torchy switches to treating them royally and admits the girl has won him over.

A humble, slow-spoken foreigner asks to see Mr. Robert; Torchy, feet on the desk, mocks him, assumes he is a peddler, and tells him to leave, but the man stubbornly keeps repeating his request.

The head clerk orders the man thrown out; the man silently weeps, so the clerk hands him to Torchy, who learns his unpronounceable name and that he was Mr. Robert's waiter at his club.

The waiter stubbornly blocks Mr. Robert's path despite Torchy's warnings; the friend stares at him and recognises him as the lone machine-gunner on the hill.

Called out by the noise, the boss asks what makes Torchy think he has the job; Torchy says he is in and they are out, hangs up his cap, and waits to see if the gamble lands.

In the interview Torchy admits he has no references, was fired for being fresh, dislikes hard work and only wants to run errands, answering every question with cheek.

Summoned to the heir's office for judgement, Torchy offers to resign, jokes his way through the questions, and says he is ambitious enough to wait for a bank president to adopt him.

The heir decides to keep him, saying his cheek is useful, and after long thought picks him for an important personal errand: fetch a package from an express office across the river without being arrested.

Expecting to be fired, Torchy waits for a reprimand that never comes; when the shy friend next appears Torchy hides behind the water cooler.

Weeks later the typist quits without explanation, and the boss's son asks Torchy to help solve a mystery: his friend met a charming woman in his car and will say no more; Torchy owns up.

Torchy offers to be fired, but the boss's son wants to know all about her, then reveals she and his friend are to be married next month.

The grandmother gets the tied-up aunt's account of the boy's mischief, then asks Torchy for his side; he says he would do the same again and admits the police uncle was a bluff.

Torchy tells her the boss has been swearing daily, leaving her gasping; next day the secretary solemnly summons him to the top boss, who greets him coldly.

The boss demands to know why Torchy reported his swearing to his relatives; Torchy admits it frankly, says he enjoyed shocking her, and asks to be fired, and the boss almost laughs.

Unable to decide whether Torchy is too fresh to keep or too sharp to lose, the boss keeps him, to the secretary's disappointment; the pious cousin then talks the overworked boss into going to a rest home run by a friend of hers.

The boss's son winks knowingly; feeling mean, Torchy confesses the forged telegram, only to learn the businessman actually came as the fake message said.

Called into the boss's office with the fussy head clerk, Torchy is quizzed about a bunch of wilted wildflowers found on Mr. Ellins's desk; he wisecracks, denies knowing anything, and the boss accepts that it is not his kind of prank.

The victim was drunk and unhurt; with witnesses and Torchy's news the sergeant takes bail and drops the sister's name, Mr. Robert says the boss need not be told, but the sister confesses everything to him on the doorstep.

She tells the boss she insisted on driving and it was all her fault; the case is dismissed and the boss thinks more of the pair than ever and will take them abroad.

The secretary had wanted a meek, polite boy and resents Torchy from the start; Torchy sizes him up as a small-minded snob and decides to needle him for fun.

The secretary tries to make him drop his nickname and lectures him on how to behave when the boss's son returns; Torchy mocks him and at first mistakes the son for someone important to the business.

The stranger says he is the boss's son; Torchy refuses to believe it until the horrified secretary confirms it, then spends an hour telling Torchy he is as good as fired, which Torchy shrugs off.

After a senior manager scatters the clerk's files, the fussy secretary blames the clerk and berates him for forty minutes, threatening his job; the clerk takes it politely without a word of excuse.

Torchy assumes the secretary is only a make-believe speculator who never risks real money, and teases him with invented tips.

At lunchtime Torchy runs into a rough-looking old messenger-boy friend he trusts completely, and stops in the building's corridor to catch up on news of his old crowd.

The fussy secretary lectures Torchy that one is known by the company one keeps; Torchy mocks him and defends his friend, calling himself a mixer.

Outside, the old boss thanks him and, reddening, says there is a mine and he is quitting the investment trade to go and see it; back at the office Torchy dodges the secretary's question about his long absence.

Torchy finds a new filing girl in tears after the fussy secretary scolded her, cheers her up with jokes, and tells her the secretary cannot fire her without higher approval.

Torchy guesses from the secretary's nerves next morning that he was the one who altered the entries, and teases him about it.

The secretary gleefully refuses to let him out; the boss's son storms in needing the ship's arrival time for his sister, and fumes that it clashes with an expected call from business partners.

The boss rejects questioning the typists or calling detectives but admits the mystery is getting on his nerves; the head clerk proposes his neighbour, a former dentist turned amateur investigator of mysteries.

The boss agrees on condition that the staff are kept in the dark; Torchy and the clerk briefly conspire together, and the stout, self-important investigator is smuggled into the boss's office with Torchy tagging along.

Touched, the boss hires the old man to supply flowers daily and puts him on the payroll, and jeers at the head clerk, whose investigator has slipped away; Torchy now has a way to squash the clerk whenever he gets officious.

The head clerk arrives with urgent office business, is brushed off by the boss, and Torchy shoos him out with a rude 'boom-boom, outside' chant; then two worried directors are announced.

The deer is under a warden's guard, and unless it reaches the club by six the heir loses the bet and faces months of jokes; Torchy takes expense money, and teases the secretary on his way out.

At the express office Torchy finds the warden is an unbribable, watchful officer sitting right beside the parcel, and nearly gives up.

While the warden is away Torchy claims the parcel, catches the ferry just ahead of him, and delivers the deer to the club; next day the heir praises him openly in front of the secretary.

Made the ailing top boss's special messenger, Torchy carries papers to the family mansion, where the boss's very large, cheerful teenage daughter finds him waiting in the hall.

Her brother has forgotten his promise to take her to a matinee; she asks Torchy instead and gets her father to excuse him from the office for the afternoon.

The boss telephones asking specifically for Torchy, not his secretary, to bring the mail, saying Torchy is responsible for his being there; Torchy travels to the remote hilltop rest home.

Torchy finds the boss sulking on the veranda of a bleak institution among dyspeptic patients; the boss works through his mail and orders away an attendant inviting him to chapel.

In the waste basket Torchy finds an invitation to a musical afternoon at a grand house far uptown; he gets expense money and the message about contracts that must be filed that afternoon, and rushes off by train and taxi.

While waiting in the top boss's library for answers to papers he brought, Torchy overhears the boss's daughter and a flirtatious southern school friend giggling over a secret romance.

The friend says the handsomest man she ever saw is secretly arriving tonight; Torchy announces himself, and both girls coax him to help, blocking the door when he tries to leave on the grounds that he is there on company business.

Flattered and promised protection from the secretary, Torchy listens as they explain: the friend was bored on a society yachting trip that broke down off a remote island.

Torchy is sent to the station with expense money, finds the weathered uncle, and is shown the nephew, a gawky, open-mouthed country youth.

Mr. Robert's married sister Marjorie arrives angry that he has stood her up to go to an artist friend's exhibition, and demands Torchy fetch him out of a sales meeting; Mr. Robert tells Torchy to make his excuses.

Mr. Robert, skipping his sister's country tea to go sailing, asks Torchy to escort 'little Gladys', a school friend of his sister's, up in the car; the car will bring Vee back, which delights Torchy.

Vee teases him but they have a happy ride back without the aunt knowing; next day Torchy dryly bills Mr. Robert a quarter for gumdrops for 'little Gladys' and plans to get even for the misleading brief.

An urgent message on a big contract may come in after hours just as Mr. Robert has a billiards match at his club; he asks Torchy to stay late, wait for the coded message, and bring it over.

Things go well until a flirtatious boarding-school friend of the daughter's phones from the station inviting herself to stay; Torchy is sent to fetch her.

The silent visitor sits motionless watching the typists until Mr. Robert takes him in; the planned half-hour meeting stretches through lunch into late afternoon, and Mr. Robert comes out frowning to ask about Torchy's diplomacy.

Mr. Robert says he wants Torchy's finesse used on the visitor; Torchy says the man is nearly impossible to talk to, and asks where he is from.

Mr. Robert explains he lost a yacht race and summoned the rival boat's designer to build him a better one; the man says he can but will not commit, apparently because something is on his mind, and Mr. Robert wants Torchy to find out what.

Sent out as Mr. Robert's substitute host with expense money, Torchy tows the silent visitor around town showing him the sights and gets no reaction; the man asks only for fish chowder.

At a fancy French restaurant the visitor refuses wine but gamely eats the strange dishes, and over coffee and a cigar he finally asks where a certain actress is performing.

She drives off; the visitor promptly decides to give the ring to her friend back home, goes home, and agrees to build the boat, and Torchy reports success to Mr. Robert.

Mr. Robert has to come out; to escape, he offers to buy a painting sight unseen, and when his sister says the artist needs appreciation, he appoints Torchy his 'commissioner' with full power to choose one.

In the car the sister coaches Torchy in a few stock art-critic phrases to use when nudged, and describes the artist as a gifted young man from a family that lost its money.

Nobody pays Torchy much attention; he genuinely likes a river scene with a bus in it and talks about it naturally, then, nudged, rattles off his coached phrases and abruptly orders it sent to Mr. Robert.

Next day Mr. Robert receives the painting marked as a five-hundred-dollar gift from the artist, and Torchy boasts of the family reunion he started.

The rival says the line is his agent's pet project and the agent won't come; the boss, told to send a representative, calms suddenly and announces he will send Torchy, stunning everyone.

The boss tells Torchy to demand the agent drop the line, or else buy his charter for up to a hundred thousand, and to say he is the office boy; Torchy brushes past the agent's secretary, who says the agent is leaving town.

The agent turns out to be a big, steady-eyed, formidable man; Torchy delivers his message nervously and is told flatly he will not quit or talk price, so asks to ride along.

In the car the agent asks Torchy's position, and Torchy sheepishly admits office boy; the agent explains his real obstacle is a stubborn farmer whose land he must cross before his charter lapses, and that he will never sell to the boss.

Moved that the stranger was kind to his only remaining child, the farmer gives him the land at his own price; Torchy reports the agent is the real power behind the rival company, and the boss resolves to win him over.

The boss's son, too busy to follow up a dinner-party promise, sends Torchy to help promote and sell the work of a penniless young Belgian sculptor, a cause taken up by the sweetheart's aunt.

Torchy catches the fainting sculptor, then spends an hour doing all the decorating, turning the bare loft into a showy studio with the aunt's borrowed finery.

The couple make Torchy best man and put him in full charge of a merry wedding anywhere he likes, with his sweetheart as sole bridesmaid and a clergyman friend to officiate.

Torchy consults his sweetheart, who suggests a friend's empty estate with an open-air theatre and a nearby country club for lunch.

The only idea Torchy can come up with is to hire a dance-hall band; the party sets off, the boss's sister in tow, and the solemn clergyman hopes the affair will not be too unconventional.

The bride backs Torchy, and the whole party is dressed in theatrical costumes, the groom in tights and cape, the clergyman in a friar's robe.

The clergyman marries the breathless couple amid cheers and roses, and everyone lunches at the club in costume at the groom's expense; the film director thanks Torchy, who says the boss does not yet know he was filmed. The rest of the chunk is the publisher's advertising.

The cousin has been arrested for sketching a mansion from the curb and drawing a crowd; the boss's son bails him out, and the cousin explains he is touring cities to study architecture.

The cousin gets lost and roughed up by a janitor, and on his next outing Torchy finds him brawling with a cab driver in a crowd and hurries him away before the police arrive.

A grand aunt arrives and scolds the boss's son for neglecting his only cousin, vowing to wait for him; just then a commotion breaks out at the elevator.

The cousin backs in pursued by some twenty newly arrived immigrants who have followed him for an hour, while the elevator man refuses to carry them again.

Heading out on errands, the sister sits in front and persuades the chauffeur to let her drive; she handles the expensive car boldly through heavy city traffic.

The car hits a fruit-seller's wagon, the driver lies still, and police arrest them all; Torchy slips away from the group so someone is free on the outside, then follows to the station.

The brother claims he was driving to shield his sister, she insists it was her; Torchy phones Mr. Robert for money and lawyers, then bluffs his way into the hospital as the injured man's nephew and finds him in the drunk ward.

The man is slumped half-dead against a railing; Mr. Robert inspects him and recognises not his friend but a hated former acquaintance who had been passing himself off under the friend's name.

The man says drink, a bad heart and starvation are killing him; they feed him hot milk and take him to a Turkish bath, and Torchy insists on staying as a witness in case he dies.

Mr. Robert gives Torchy money to get the man shaved and dressed in an old evening suit; cleaned up and deciding not to die after all, the man asks to talk, and Mr. Robert has Torchy sit in as witness.

Two weeks later the mother comes in tearful; Mr. Robert tells Torchy the couple changed plans on the bride's whim and are alone at a remote mountain lodge.

The bride has written home that she is wretched and her husband unbearable; Mr. Robert fears she is being abused, does not trust his own temper, and asks Torchy to go and find out.

They settle on Torchy delivering a box of orchids as his excuse; Torchy sets off full of sympathy for the bride and eager to see the husband punished.

At the luxurious lodge the bride runs out hoping for a visitor, is disappointed it is only Torchy, then crams the costly orchids into her sash and demands he admire her.

She wants her husband to invite her old suitors up for company; Torchy finds no sign of injury, and she complains her husband has been sulking and drags Torchy off to play.

She lists her husband's complaints as petty: her letters to a suitor, the servants threatening to leave, a tennis court he had built that she won't use; then she makes Torchy play golf and dance with her.

She teaches Torchy new dances intimately; the husband comes in and asks to cut in, and she refuses, throws the orchids away, and rebuffs his invitation to watch the sunset.

Instead of raging, the husband slumps unhappily; he tells Torchy he cannot satisfy her whims, she has changed her mind on every plan, and things cannot go on like this.

At dinner the bride flirts with Torchy and ignores her husband; the food is badly cooked, she sends back the dessert, a maid smirks, and she flounces off, leaving him desperate.

The boss's timid son-in-law arrives in a loud hat and coat, embarrassed, and won't go to his club for fear of ridicule; he reveals a garish plush tie his wife chose for him.

He cannot bear the tie and hat but won't hurt his wife's feelings; Torchy suggests he keep a quiet outfit in the car and change on the way to and from town, and he rushes off delighted.

The son-in-law forgot to change back into the garish tie, and his wife is furious and won't listen; Torchy advises him to 'confide' his defence to the gossipy nieces so it reaches her.

Torchy finds the boss's helpless son-in-law lost in the building's arcade, steers him to the telegraph window, and offers to decide for him what his telegram should say.

As she dances every number with the stranger, the son-in-law grows uneasy and insists on finding out who he is; the boss's son teases him about his substitute.

A week later Torchy sees her go into a shabby building housing a drama school; though it is none of his business he follows her up and hears her declaiming.

The teacher is flattering her extravagantly and promising a Broadway production for a price; Torchy recognises his voice as a small-time vaudeville ham and publicity-seeker he knew from his newspaper days.

Seeing she believes the man, Torchy catches her at her carriage and tells her he overheard the lesson; she blushes and is shaken.

She begs him not to tell, and explains her family always calls her too big for everything, while the teacher alone said she was not; Torchy will not run to the family but will not let the fraud fleece her either.

Torchy tells her the teacher is a has-been after her money; she calls him impudent and refuses to hear more, until he bluffs that he will tell her brother.

The daughter bursts in, and the teacher, thinking her purse a pistol, dives under a desk; she throws him his fee and storms out, and back at the office Torchy is teased for his long absence.

The boss has been irritable over a visiting cousin: a short, gaudily dressed, much-married widow with a head for business and a taste for fads.

The boss summons the cousin, who leaves flushed and tearful but defiant; he then quizzes Torchy about a self-styled 'sculptor poet' whose book he waves in disgust.

The boss reads out the poet's bad verse and a gushing inscription to the cousin, gives Torchy twenty dollars, and orders a full investigation, being sure the poet is after her money.

The poet cheerfully feeds them publicity material and cigars; the reporter vows a sarcastic write-up, while the cousin trails the poet everywhere, drawing sniggers from the guests.

After readings and a fine fish soup, the cousin sits by the reporter, who tells her the poet is a fake who makes his money in cheese.

The reporter invents a wife and six children, whom the poet beats; the cousin shrieks, denounces the bewildered poet as a monster before everyone, faints, and storms out, breaking up the party.

Torchy gives the reporter the boss's twenty dollars; the next day's paper runs a glowing story on the party, and the boss, told the romance is over, asks no further questions and jokes about Torchy's methods.

Sitting with the bored son-in-law, Torchy is horrified to see the boss's daughter take the floor for a showy dance with the impostor.

To his surprise the daughter dances beautifully and lightly, and the pair win applause from the room.

The man produces a genuine invitation from the boss's daughter and admits she hired him from her dancing school; he is a paid partner who escorts ladies to parties for a fee.

Torchy parks the brother in a side room and warns the boss's son, then offers to get the man out of the way if given free rein.

Promised a hundred dollars to keep the brother away until the ceremony is over, Torchy hustles him into a cab with vague talk of someone waiting, and can think of nowhere to go but the groom's house.

Torchy's hints about escape are answered vaguely; at the house he decides to present the brother to the hostile aunt as a surprise.

The cane is an immigrant agent's badge; when Torchy takes it the crowd follows him, and the boss's son orders him out with them and promises twenty dollars; Torchy marches them off.

Torchy hands the cane to a doorman he dislikes and escapes, leaving the crowd with him; he pockets the twenty dollars and the cousin goes home.

He proposes going to a fellow exile who runs a remote banana plantation abroad and would keep him; Mr. Robert eagerly asks when a ship sails and has Torchy call a cab.

The man asks for clothes too; next morning Mr. Robert tells Torchy he locked him in his cabin and bribed a steward to keep him there until the ship was well out, and swears to burn any more old dress suits.

The boss's son and the husband decide to confront the stranger; Torchy heads off a scene by offering to do it quietly, and takes the man into the dressing room.

He boasts of his income and his conquests and gloats at snubbing his family; disgusted, Torchy tells him the husband and brother are furious about the talk.

The man panics and flees, and Torchy has his sister smuggle him out the back; meanwhile the boss's daughter tells the family she hired him because she was tired of being a wallflower.

Torchy reports the man has left unwell and wants his fee by post; the boss's son asks how he did it, and Torchy says it was just talk.

The guest, a coquettish Southern belle, orders Torchy about, calls him honey, cuddles up to him in the car, and brightens when she hears the boss's son is there.

Told the boss's son is spoken for, she scoffs and flirts with Torchy instead; he mockingly asks if her intentions are serious until she drops his arm in fury.

She holds up dinner to change into a startling gown, then attaches herself to the boss's son, leaving the singer trailing behind.

The daughter calls a council to get rid of the flirt, since the singer is left reading alone; a chauffeur's deserted wife arrives with her small children to ask for news of her runaway husband.

Learning the missing husband shares the boss's son's first name, Torchy borrows the woman and her children and poses them conspicuously at the garden gate.

In front of the flirt Torchy tells the boss's son that 'she' is back with the children and wants her Robert; he laughs, and the flirt calls him a brute and storms off.

The boss's son declines to have the misunderstanding cleared up, goes to find the singer, and sends money to the deserted wife; the flirt leaves by train, and that night the couple stroll in the moonlight.

Torchy takes the blame, argues he could not show a senator's son into the general office, then tells the heir the clerk's whole story and praises his grit; the heir asks what he suggests.

The boss explodes, suspecting the clerk means to turn witness; Torchy says the man knows nothing and is simply too honest, so he is too valuable to lose and too risky to turn loose.

The boss calms, hears the old man's story from Torchy, and sends him west as a travelling auditor, to be retired on full pay near his son; the old man is chiefly glad the books need not be altered.

The bride's stew is a failure and the senator jokes about the cook sleeping on the fire escape; Torchy slips away to the top boss's home and reminds him a senior manager is being dismissed for failing in the capital.

Torchy recommends his friend, now a senator's son-in-law, for the post; amused, the boss appoints him at five thousand a year, and the senator, hearing the news, becomes all congratulations.

Moved by the man's hopelessness, Torchy takes the document himself, sends the man home, and later slips it onto the top boss's desk as if it came through proper channels.

Summoned, Torchy admits he bypassed the secretary; the boss reveals the company has been trying to get that very property for eight months and denounces the secretary.

The waiter explains that he took leave to go home, was promised his job back, but found it given to the chef's cousin; he has also spent the savings he needed to buy into his sweetheart's father's business.

The friend never learned the soldier's name or fate; Mr. Robert notices Torchy eavesdropping, and Torchy uses the moment to mention the waiter, but Mr. Robert puts him off and sends him out.

The waiter shyly admits he held the hill until the army arrived, was discharged, and has now lost his job; the friend is outraged at such ingratitude, and Mr. Robert takes the waiter into his office.

Torchy tracks the inventor to his cluttered workshop-home; the old man, insulted by the manager, says he will take his idea to a rival firm, and Torchy calls him a quitter.

He ends by inviting questions to the inventor; the meeting runs for hours and ends with an option paid and a trial plant voted, the manager slinks out, and the boss's son says he is proud of him.

Torchy takes a quiet, well-spoken filing clerk for a pampered softie and mocks him at the lunch counter; the clerk takes it with a grin.

The clerk confides that his whole family had to pull strings to get him even this job; puzzled that such a capable man is stuck filing, Torchy watches him work and reflects that the head office boy's post suits him better.

Torchy dares the secretary to fire him instead; later the clerk explains he is a college man with a late start, and Torchy pities him, having seen how green graduates fare.

Torchy picks out the office joke at once: a meek, old-fashioned elderly clerk in fifteen-year-old clothes, a low-paid sub-assistant of the kind always at risk of being cut in a shake-up.

Torchy jokes at the old clerk daily, but gets only a sad, gentle smile back, and decides there is no sport in teasing someone who never fights back.

The two become lunch friends; the old man proudly describes his reforming son out west, and Torchy meets the boastful small-time broker son-in-law the old man lives with.

At home the son-in-law treats the old man with contempt and warns he had better keep his job; the old man's joy is his flower garden, and Torchy suggests he move west to his son.

Torchy goes to spend a weekend with a fastidious, well-dressed audit clerk of about thirty whom the office teases; the clerk earns little, has no hope of a raise, and is one of the firm's easily replaced cogs.

The boss's son tells the senior clerk to keep her on figures and away from the old man; Torchy works three hours with her on tables, finds her accurate, and when he says so she gives him a shy, grateful smile.

The typist is the butt of the office for her old-fashioned clothes and plain looks; Torchy is surprised to see her walk off hand in hand with a sturdy young man.

Teased, she solemnly explains the young man studied an ancient language with her at college in their small Midwestern home town; she says she dislikes the city.

She says crowds terrify her and tells how, at twelve, a cyclone killed her whole family in front of her; Torchy stops joking and understands her blank stare.

The sporting friend recognises the newcomer from a summer camp and calls him by a girlish nickname he hates; the small man bristles and the big one laughs.

The sporting friend, a practical joker and big-game hunter, keeps needling the violinist, who gives as good as he gets, and teasingly invites him on a bear hunt.

The violinist frankly admits he is terrified of large animals and leaves; the boss's son gives Torchy an invitation to a musical evening at which his sweetheart will be, and the joker realises the performer is his victim.

The joker begs an invitation to the musical to have sport with the violinist, describing him as a conceited, sharp-tongued little snob everyone puts up with for his music.

He learns a hearty sporting woman will be there too, gets his invitation, and leaves chuckling over a plan; later the boss's daughter brings the mannish woman into the office.

He plays brilliantly and is rude about the applause; during a lullaby a man in a bear costume shambles in behind him, growling.

White with terror, the violinist nevertheless grabs the music stand to fight; the sportswoman rips off the bear's head to expose the joker, rebukes him, and carries the hysterical violinist out of the room.

The family round on the sheepish joker, and the boss's son is scolding him when the violinist returns.

The violinist explains he has been an invalid for fifteen years, refuses sympathy, and dismisses the joker as all beef and no brains; the joker slinks off. The sweetheart fetches Torchy to the sportswoman, who is weeping.

The boss's son, who had never met the cousin before, gives Torchy the day off to guide him and keep him out of trouble until evening, promising to make it worth his while.

The cousin stubbornly refuses any escort and will not give up his earmuffs; Torchy sees he secretly thinks himself a genius, while the boss's son still believes him an innocent and lectures him.

Torchy is appalled but follows the plan: feed them, keep them busy, and bring them to a big society party where the friend can meet the nephew quietly.

Torchy lodges them in a cheap hotel and phones the daughter, who decides the nephew must wear evening dress and will send an old suit of her brother's.

Everyone laughs at the nephew's comic clothes at dinner; back at the hotel he refuses to wear the evening suit.

Torchy and the uncle wrestle him into the suit; at the theatre the uncle sits solemn, determined not to look like a greenhorn.

The nephew snores through the play and has to be dragged out; Torchy spends more expense money on a taxi to the grand house, where they are admitted as the daughter's guests.

After the son leaves, the mother comes back to Torchy's desk, flatters his kind face, and asks him to befriend her son and keep an eye on him.

She offers five dollars for every 'satisfactory' weekly report on her son; Torchy accepts, realises he now has to make the son behave to get paid, and is rebuffed again when he tries to be friendly.

After some days the newcomer asks about the cheap lunch place: his father has not paid his club bill and he is posted for debt, and he has run his wages down to almost nothing by midweek.

The newcomer says he won't speak to the 'freaks' at his boarding house and grumbles about his department head; Torchy refuses to join in and learns he wrecked a speeding car in his idle days.

The newcomer explains that a car crash and expulsion from college made his father send him to work; Torchy announces he is 'retained' to help him make good, is scorned as a mucker, and tells him bluntly he is a poor clerk about to be fired.

Torchy lectures him to come early, stay late, please his boss and not fail at a small job; the newcomer grudgingly agrees to try, and Torchy sends the mother a candid report.

The newcomer starts arriving early and working hard, wins praise from his department head, and proposes a filing scheme; Torchy next urges him to mix with his fellow boarders.

He has become friends with an immigrant socialist writer and is volunteering to teach boys at a slum settlement; Torchy writes all this proudly into his report, hoping for a bonus.

After a long wait, 'little Gladys' appears as a heavily made-up sixteen-year-old with dyed hair and big earrings, and scornfully says Mr. Robert sent one of his 'young men' in his place.

Torchy tries to ride up front but she insists he sit with her; he asks which theatre she performs at, and she says she has merely had her hair done, and starts redoing it in the mirror.

She chatters that her mother makes scenes over her looks, that she was expelled from one school, and that she keeps up with actress friends her mother forbids.

She flirts with her eyes; Torchy tells her he dislikes painted girls and that she is a kid, they swap insults, and she soon makes it up and takes the last gumdrop.

Meeting an old messenger-boy friend, Torchy telephones the heir for the name of the likely informer, then has the friend deliver a fake message calling the warden to the telephone.

Torchy finds the address is a fly-by-night brokerage; a former messenger boy now trading on the street tells him the stock is a wildcat.

They meet a sports columnist Torchy knows from his newspaper days, who is thrilled to find the friend, a famous former football star, and wants an article from him; the friend wants his fame forgotten.

The columnist knows the official and where he is dining with a rival group of businessmen, and offers to bring him out in exchange for the football article, which the friend agrees to write.

Realising he is headed for the home town of the boatbuilder he once helped, Torchy takes heart, barges into the steamer's wheelhouse, and wins over the grumpy pilot by naming the boatbuilder, his cousin.

Using directories and the who's-who, Torchy learns the poet's basic facts, then heads to the old newspaper office where he once worked and runs into a former reporter who hangs about there.

The reporter, once brilliant and full of schemes, is now hooked on stock speculation; he greets Torchy flippantly and asks whether there is a story in his errand.

Circling the block, Torchy hails a telegraph messenger boy, trades on his own past as one, and has the boss tip the boy a dollar.

For five dollars more the boy reveals the financier's messenger always enters by a side door in a nearby bank, guarded by a watchman; Torchy asks what excuse they could use.

Told not to come back until he has succeeded, Torchy goes to a reporter friend from his newspaper days, who learns the charge is grand larceny of twenty thousand dollars in cash.

At the estate they find a film company already shooting under a permit from the owner, run by Torchy's old newspaper friend.

The friend is filming a costume village wedding and proposes they combine; Torchy seizes on it, since the boss's son only asked for merriment.

A loud, wealthy young man and his glamorous sister arrive asking for the clerk by his college nickname, clearly expecting him to be an important man in the firm.

To spare the clerk embarrassment, Torchy tells the visitors he is in conference with the general manager, then smuggles him into the absent heir's private office and shows the friends in there.

The friends greet the clerk as a hero and the sister kisses him; he is too flustered to speak, and at that moment the heir walks into his own office.

Caught out, Torchy stalls the puzzled heir; the loud visitor turns out to know the heir and hails him, praising the clerk as a college football star.

The visitor tells the heir the clerk runs the trust and this is his office; Torchy signals frantically behind him, and the heir decides to play along without knowing why.

The heir chats football and, asked which of them works for which, says they both work for the company; the visitors leave believing the clerk is near the top, and the clerk starts to apologise.

Torchy stations her outside the open transom and goes in posing as still being with the newspaper; the teacher boasts of his rich new pupil.

At the grand hotel the desk clerk says the official is out and receives no one; Torchy's bluff fails, but the friend refuses to leave without satisfaction.

The boy's mother screams he is being killed and demands the police; Torchy bluffs that his uncle is a police captain and threatens a counter-complaint.

The reporter smuggles Torchy in posing as a press-agency man; the party is in a smart building with society guests, and the cousin, extravagantly dressed, waits eagerly for the host.

The financier is famous for being unreachable; at his building a house detective says no one knows where he is, and the old man refuses to believe it.

Upstairs, the silent, secretive offices yield only a clerk who denies knowing the man; the old man storms out, and Torchy recalls the financier is said to use a private lift.

Learning the financier loves fancy poultry, Torchy buys two prize birds; at the secret door he tells the guard his boss is a famous breeder delivering birds that were ordered.

Torchy introduces a typist whose fine clothes and grand manner make everyone take her for a society lady; on his first day he mistook her for a visitor and held the door for her.

A rumour spreads that she is a ruined society girl, and the whole staff, especially the snobbish secretary, start fawning on her; Torchy mockingly nicknames her 'Lady Mildred'.

The nickname sticks and she accepts it without blinking; the staff wait on her and invent grand stories about her, though the boss's son treats her as a joke.

The son finds she is no heiress but a Midwestern girl who learned dressmaking and polish while waiting for a chance; the family come round, and the friend makes Torchy an usher at the wedding.

The boy threatens to have Torchy dismissed; the girl says Torchy acts more like a gentleman, the boy tells her to take Torchy as a partner then, and she asks Torchy for the next waltz.

Torchy makes the boy swap clothes with him under threat of a scene, and the girl backs him; he goes onto the ballroom floor in borrowed evening dress with her on his arm.

They dance brilliantly while she chatters about the scandalised chaperones and her furious aunt, and they applaud for an encore.

Torchy dashes back, swaps clothes, puts the rival on the cloakroom counter with orders to know nothing, and leaves; the boy flees, and Torchy decides the girl makes his old sweetheart look ordinary.

The customer is a ne'er-do-well Torchy once knew as a lunch-counter hand; now dressed like a swell, he pretends not to know Torchy at first, then slips away.

Torchy recalls the man as a useless, often-fired, ungainly idler he used to lend money to, the only son in a hard-working family whose sisters have all done well.

The man arrives in full evening dress and is received at the door by his own sister, the maid, who gasps his name; he stares through her. Torchy dutifully asks the heavy boss's daughter to dance, and is relieved when she says she is engaged.

The next week the same pair are there; his sweetheart explains the guest is from a family newly rich through her father's antiques business, and was sent to an expensive finishing school.

Torchy telephones the stunned secretary that he will not be back, rides to the theatre in the family carriage feeling tiny beside her, and is dismayed to find the play is Shakespeare.

Torchy is to be an usher at the wedding he helped bring about; the whole office has pitched in with a present, a new suit and coaching in manners, when trouble arrives in the shape of the groom's suspicious aunt.

Torchy works the cloakroom at a society dancing-class ball, handing out tickets to rich, spoiled teenage boys who boast about school pranks and sneak in to smoke.

The house turns out to be a girls' finishing school; bluffing past the maid, Torchy steps into a hall full of two hundred girls in white who all turn to stare and giggle at him.

Torchy lounges happily in the garden until the concert ends and the girls pour out, trapping him in a corner.

The girls parade past staring and giggling at his red hair; he refuses food offered by maids and wishes the son would come, until he sees the heiress he once danced with.

Torchy buys gumdrops for the child, enjoys lolling grandly in the chauffeured car and sneering at people in taxis, and senses he is due for a comeuppance.

After sleeping off his seasickness, Torchy wanders the fashionable harbour town among yachting people and feels completely out of place.

As private secretary Torchy now gets invited to the boss's daughter's dance like a real guest; the son-in-law refuses to learn to dance, and in a shoe shop Torchy overhears a customer ordering expensive pumps sent to his hotel.

Torchy grumbles that the former filing clerk, now his friend, has him studying schoolbooks in his spare moments at the gate, though he sees no use in it.

Torchy studies to please the friend, reciting his lessons each evening; the boss's son notices, and Torchy explains that the friend has been promoted from filing to a salaried post and credits Torchy for it.

Since she left he has smartened up his collars, ties and teeth, daydreaming that by her return he will be a senior executive sent abroad on company business.

Torchy, still head office boy after nearly four years, announces that his big step up came suddenly one day; he explains that it began with his first made-to-measure suit, bought for cash to impress a girl.

He gets his first barber's shave, feeling watched and green, and the boss's son in the next chair recognises him, laughs kindly and pays for it, then inspects the new suit back at the office.

Torchy puzzles over the man's new money, takes dancing lessons for the party because his sweetheart will be there, and at the dance sees the man arrive.

The clerk admits he has been on the same small salary for a year and is not satisfied, but lacks the nerve to leave; Torchy prods him to quit and try elsewhere.

The clerk lives alone in a cheap room, hiding from everyone he knew until he makes good, and spends his evenings studying the company's business in trade papers.

The old man is ashamed to face his son as a failure, meekly accepts his son-in-law's scorn, and says some must stay at the bottom and prop the ladder; he is useful at work but never credited.

Torchy meets his old newspaper boss on Broadway and boasts that he is an 'office-boy-de-luxe' at the Corrugated Trust; the old boss is plainly disappointed he has not climbed higher, but Torchy likes his bosses and has a mine deal pending with Mr. Robert.

Torchy confides that he will tell Vee how he feels once he is in business for himself; he is dragged to see the baby, and on the way out meets the son-in-law looking glum.

He threatens to quit rather than face them, and explains why: after four years he is still an office boy on paper, and he will not be put on show as a nobody before the girl he loves.

She hesitates, then comes over and greets him warmly with both hands; he admits he feels outclassed there and worries the others will talk.

She stares down the watching girls, serves him tea and sandwiches, and tells him she is an orphan living with an aunt who is taking her abroad for two years after graduation.

Torchy's friend gets only a modest promotion and raise for winning the big contract; he soberly admits things are off with the senator's daughter he loved, though he still carries her picture.

Her letters about balls and expensive tastes made him feel he could never keep her, so he let his replies dwindle.

A year after the heiress went abroad, her photograph still stands on Torchy's bureau in the silver frame his elderly landlady bought without a word; he thinks two years is too long to hope and that he is nothing beside her.

Torchy, an orphan with few friends, reflects that she was kind to him on the only two occasions they met, and cannot work out why she noticed him at all.

He elaborates a fantasy of meeting her on the homeward ship dressed all in grey, making a polished remark, and strolling the deck with her by moonlight.

A postcard arrives saying she sails home on the tenth with a count who is 'a dear'; Torchy swings between joy and despair, then admits he has no right to object.

She says Europe was dull and her aunt has given up on her music; the moment turns tender, he kisses her, and she hurries him to the front seat before waving goodbye; he reports to the boss's son about her.

The aunt keeps Vee away from Torchy at every turn, then takes her off on a round of fashionable summer resorts; Torchy follows her in the society columns and feels how far he is below that world.

He leaves with a sarcastic parting shot and drives off in gloom, unable to see how to announce his newly discovered family without seeming to boast, and decides to see the girl anyway.

The mother stays to dinner and learns her daughter is the cook; the senator inspects the tiny flat and cross-examines the friend, who admits to twenty-five dollars a week and no private income.

The friend lays out his finances to the last dollar, with seven dollars left; the senator grimly wishes them luck, plainly expecting an appeal for help within a month.

Torchy admits he is slow at courting Vee and gets teased about it; her aunt has flatly told him his visits are unwelcome and that he is not to come back.

The aunt whisks Vee off on a long winter voyage, which Torchy learns of only after the ship has sailed; now they are back, and after two weeks he still has found no way to see her.

The aunt walks in on them tussling on the sofa and demands an explanation; Torchy claims it is a new game, reminds her she never expected him back, and escapes past her.

The boatbuilder tells Torchy the girl is staying at a very rich man's private estate reachable only by private road or launch, with no-trespass signs and dogs; Torchy admits the aunt is against him.

Torchy dodges the aunt for days, but grows careless and waves his hat, showing his red hair; she watches through field-glasses, and waits grimly on the dock that evening.

The aunt makes him take off his hat and recognises him; next morning she and Vee have left for the mountains, the regular boatman returns, and Torchy refuses pay from the heir and goes home content.

The girls say Vee keeps a hidden snapshot of him in a boat and doesn't want her aunt to know; Torchy plays dumb but is secretly delighted.

The girls report the aunt dislikes him because he is poor and 'isn't anybody'; he carries them off in a romp just as Vee comes down dressed to leave and greets him warmly.

The girl's aunt keeps refusing his calls, so Torchy bluffs his way up to her apartment, only to find the aunt at home with a sprained ankle, who icily asks his excuse.

He asks outright to take the girl for a walk; the aunt calls the friendship a whim, then presses him on his job and learns he is still an office boy and has never told the girl how humble his post is.

The aunt breaks off as if struck by an idea and has him shown out; Torchy worries what she is plotting, while at work the firm is busy with big deals and a paper break-up into many separate companies.

Praised, Torchy is asked to soothe another caller: the girl's aunt, a bondholder alarmed by reorganisation rumours, who is coming at three with someone else; Torchy realises she is bringing the girl and refuses.

The aunt and the girl are shown in to find Torchy at a real desk; he starts explaining her bonds, and when he says he is private secretary she calls it absurd and sweeps out, while the girl winks at him.

Torchy had expected the new post to be all desk work, but it keeps pulling him into action; checking the transfer book, he sees that his sweetheart's aunt is swapping a large holding of the firm's bonds for shares in a rival concern.

The mother forgives her son; the aunt, suspicious at first, checks the falling stock, cancels the deal and thanks Torchy, and the boss's son is amazed by his methods.

The aunt grudgingly allows Torchy one supervised call a week, making clear she is only humouring her niece's whim and hinting that many other young men admire the girl.

His sweetheart explains the guest is unhappy at home; the restless guest keeps interrupting their chat, and at ten the aunt appears and silently shows Torchy out.

The young man promises and calls her Mother; the girls come in and all embrace tearfully, and Torchy slips away, dreading the day he might have to ask his sweetheart's aunt.

At the shabby studio the aunt scorns Torchy as a substitute while his sweetheart defends him; the frail sculptor, decorating on a ladder, grows dizzy.

Torchy tells the aunt to make the show invitation-only, mark prices up and give the margin to Belgian relief for publicity, and woo the reporters at home; she swallows her disdain and adopts the plan.

He offers to draw up a list of wealthy guests; she adds a rich but socially unacceptable merchant, then makes clear Torchy himself is not welcome at the event.

The aunt says she merely recognises existing social distinctions; she insists on coming along to buy the tea things, and Torchy leads them to one of the merchant's cheap chain groceries.

The mellowed aunt tells Torchy to come to the tea after all, in his best coat, and he reports to the boss's son that he and the aunt make a great team.

Torchy calls to take his sweetheart driving, but the aunt receives him coldly, reminds him it is not his visiting day, and he nervously invites her along too.

The aunt declines and says the girl is busy; she tells him his attentions are unwelcome and that it humiliates her when servants smile announcing a nameless waif known only by a nickname.

He loiters, then talks his way past the dim maid and finds the girl alone; they are holding hands on a sofa when the aunt appears in the doorway.

As the aunt begins to denounce him, callers are announced; she shuts him and the girl behind curtains and receives the guests, who are Torchy's newly married uncle and aunt, known to her from abroad.

Torchy tells his sweetheart the caller is his real uncle; they listen, amused, to the aunt's sweet company voice until she sends for the girl, leaving Torchy hidden.

The uncle praises the girl and mentions a nephew, the lost son of a woman the aunt once admired; the uncle tells of the mother's brave death nursing at the front.

Embarrassed by the uncle's praise, Torchy slips out, bribes the maid, rings the front bell himself, and has her present his calling card bearing his real name.

The aunt reads the unfamiliar name; the uncle calls Torchy in, the aunt is thunderstruck, and his sweetheart laughs and teases him for never mentioning such a grand name.

The aunt no longer objects as the couple withdraw together to the library, where they sit close over tea.

He puts her picture away, vowing not to go to the pier, yet shaves for the first time, dresses in his best, and asks the secretary whether any outside errands are due.

Torchy has a messenger-boy friend forge a telegram in which the expected businessman promises to come; the son therefore sends Torchy to meet his sister at the ship.

The heiress is amused at the count's removal; at the boss's house she sends the daughter in ahead, leaving Torchy a few minutes alone with her to flirt.

Dressed up, Torchy goes to the apartment with a plan to lure Vee out by posing as a messenger from the aunt's favoured suitor, but two other young callers arrive with him and the maid shows all three straight in.

A gushing Southern relative sweeps in and hails the young men as knights come to woo the 'Princess'; Torchy spots Vee surrounded by admirers and sees with relief that the aunt is not there.

The rivals rush off for candy and stolen orchids; Torchy hangs back, hides behind the hall door as everyone leaves, and is alone with Vee when she shuts it.

Vee teases him but invites him in; he tells her he had to see her whatever her aunt said, and they measure themselves in the mirror and find he has grown taller than her.

Holding her hand, Torchy notices she no longer wears the ring he gave her and is crestfallen, until she draws it out on a chain hidden round her neck.

To get a look at the estate, Torchy goes out in borrowed oilskins on a dirty lobster boat with a smelly old fisherman who lets him crank the engine.

Seasick and nauseated by rotten bait and tobacco, Torchy is teased by the fisherman; at last they pass the estate, and people are out on the veranda.

At the yacht club float, the rich young heir comes in too fast in his speedboat; Torchy leaps and fends it off, and the heir, whose boatman is laid up, gratefully accepts Torchy's help.

The heir eagerly hires Torchy as his boatman for a few days and kits him out in a uniform; Torchy finds himself steering a speedboat straight toward Vee.

At the estate's float Torchy keeps his back turned while the heir fetches the picnic party, and hears Vee's voice among them.

A very stout cousin grabs Torchy's arm getting aboard, spinning him round face to face with a startled Vee, whom he signals to keep quiet; he makes the cousin comfortable and gives his name as 'Bill'.

The aunt waves from the veranda but stays behind; Torchy revels in the ride and in serving the cousin candy, and tells the ladies he came up specially to get this job.

Egged on by the romantic cousin, Torchy describes 'the girl' he came for in terms that plainly mean Vee, including her peppery temper, and Vee teases back.

The tide floats the boat, but Torchy secretly disconnects a key engine wire before reporting it afloat; the heir cranks and cranks in vain.

While the heir gets covered in grease taking the engine apart and the cousin dozes, Torchy and Vee go exploring the tiny island hand in hand; she learns he was in the smelly lobster boat.

The fog lifts to show they are a mile from home; Torchy 'finds' and reconnects the loose wire in a minute, the cousin says she will never go out without him, and he serves as boatman for four happy days.

The son-in-law invites Torchy to see his baby; Torchy declines until he hears Vee is staying there, then eagerly agrees to come on Sunday.

His last letters to Vee came back marked refused, so he goes to clear things up; the sister, Marjorie, says her husband is in disgrace, and mentions that Vee is leaving within the hour.

Marjorie agrees to send Vee down; while Torchy waits in the library two giggling young nieces spy on him and identify him by his red hair.

Vee and Torchy greet each other with mock formality for the girls' benefit; the girls refuse every attempt to get rid of them, so Torchy must speak to Vee with them listening.

He mentions the returned letters; Vee says to send them care of Marjorie, then hurries off as her aunt arrives, and the girls tell Torchy they like him and ask if he loves her.

The couple have left a country-house invitation unanswered and must reply at once; Torchy first drafts a refusal, then learns it is the house where his sweetheart is staying while her aunt is away.

Torchy reverses himself, talks the son-in-law past every objection into accepting, and offers himself as the extra young man they had promised to bring.

The boss's daughter happily agrees, and Torchy arrives with them at a grand country house owned by a newly rich patent-medicine maker, hoping for time alone with his sweetheart.

The woman, a good-humoured, tomboyish unmarried sportswoman near thirty, greets Torchy boisterously; on the night Torchy arrives early and snatches half an hour with his sweetheart before her aunt appears.

Torchy and the girl start flirting, until a flashy clerk from the stock department courts her too and Torchy becomes a side issue; he buys her a box of chocolates, and the boss's son sees him coming out of the shop with it.

The boss's son teases him about his sweetheart; waiting for her after work, Torchy has to hear the rival brag, and then the girl sweeps past Torchy to sell the rival tickets to a ball.

She agrees to go to the ball with the rival and mocks Torchy as 'a cute little fellow'; next day the rival cheekily asks Torchy to cover his evening cloakroom job that night for half pay and half the tips, and Torchy agrees to show he bears no grudge.

Torchy spots the rival and the former sweetheart gaping at him from the gallery; the girl flirts with him, then warns that her aunt is coming.

He finds the heiress beside the boss's daughter and, deciding he will push forward count or no count, shouts her name through his hands.

The count proves to be a bespectacled middle-aged man; the daughter has invited the heiress to dinner, and Torchy teases that the count is rather old.

The heiress greets Torchy warmly and introduces him to her doubtful aunt; when the count says he will follow the young ladies, Torchy hails a second taxi and packs him off with the aunt.

Asked his name, Torchy stalls, and Vee rescues him by calling him an old friend; he takes the alias 'Claude', while the aunt's favoured suitor, whom Torchy once humiliated at a dance, glowers at him.

Vee whispers that the relative is a perennial belle who has decided to launch her into society; the belle keeps the young men competing to flatter Vee, who is bored and embarrassed by it.

Several young men compete to book Vee for the same night; the relative turns it into a contest of chivalry, and Torchy tells her bluntly that Vee wants her to drop the 'Princess' nonsense.

Vee refuses to set tasks, so the relative declares a tournament: each suitor must do something by eight o'clock to win Vee's company for the night; Torchy is dared into it and agrees without knowing what he will do.

He sees Vee in white laughing with the rich young heir in tennis clothes while the aunt parades nearby; ashamed of his reeking oilskins, Torchy hides under his sou'wester and hurries the boat on.

Vee cuts him off when he nearly gives her away; the heir asks for Vee to join him at the wheel, and Torchy passes it on, getting a hand squeeze and a whispered 'Pepper!' while he is left to feed the cousin.

The cousin praises Torchy as better than the regular boatman, while the heir shows Vee how to steer; the heir turns back on sighting a fog bank.

Fog swallows the islands and the heir, anxious and uncertain, soon loses his bearings among the rocks.

The boat runs aground on rocks; the heir wants to press on, but the cousin insists on picnicking where they are, Vee agrees, and they haul the cousin ashore.

Vee is touched that he came so far; they agree the heir, her aunt's latest choice, is nice but a stick, and they have a long, affectionate talk until the fog lifts.

Torchy leaves elated, but on his first visit finds the aunt's favoured suitor, a wealthy, wooden young man, already installed at the piano, along with a strange girl.

The girl, a haughty, peevish beauty, snubs Torchy and monopolises the rival at the piano; Torchy teases his sweetheart that her aunt has arranged a crowd for his evenings.

Calling at the guest's family's cluttered house, Torchy meets the rival, who excitedly announces that she has just accepted his ring; Torchy assumes he means his own sweetheart.

Torchy stiffly congratulates him, then learns the fiancée is the guest; relieved, he warms to the rival, who wants to ask the girl's mother rather than her father, and Torchy advises against it.

He asks for her photograph and gives his address; the son finds them together and congratulates Torchy, then belatedly worries about the contracts.

They danced all night, drove round the park till dawn and married at eight, telegraphing her father afterwards; the friend gets ten days off from the top boss, and later invites Torchy to their first home dinner in a small flat.

A postcard from Vee says her seaside place is nice but awfully stupid; Torchy is daydreaming over it when a buzzer calls him, and he answers Mr. Robert so sulkily that Mr. Robert asks whether it is distress or disposition.

Torchy blurts out that he needs a vacation at once; Mr. Robert, guessing the girl is the reason, gives him two weeks' advance pay and wishes him luck, and Torchy rushes for the train.

Torchy admits the suit is for his sweetheart, just back from abroad; the boss's son wishes him luck and says, turning serious, that he wishes he could do more for him some day, then goes back to the heavy workload he carries while the old boss is away.

Now sitting in on directors' meetings, Torchy is sent to the boss's son's desk for papers and cigarettes, and brings back an old leather case that holds only a miniature portrait of a young woman.

Torchy broods over how to repay the boss's son for his help with his own romance; on his supervised weekly visit, now announced by his new family name, he holds yarn for his sweetheart while the aunt watches.

He spots a concert leaflet on the table showing the woman in the miniature, a singer giving a charity recital, and hints the story to his sweetheart.

The sweetheart is thrilled; they plot together, and next morning Torchy slips the leaflet into the boss's son's mail in an ordinary envelope.

The boss's son shows no reaction and says nothing all day, but keeps the leaflet; Torchy and his sweetheart decide to go ahead.

At the fashionable recital the singer turns out to be plain and simple in manner, until she begins to sing.

Her singing wins the audience over; when flowers are thrown, Torchy tosses a dozen roses bearing the boss's son's card at her feet.

She reads the card, blushes, falters, searches the audience, and after the interval returns wearing the roses over her heart.

After the concert she comes down into the audience, and Torchy and his sweetheart try to flee; she goes instead to the boss's son, who was there all along, and thanks him for the roses; he catches Torchy's eye and plays along.

Outside, the boss's son asks whether his card went with the roses, says sarcastically that he hopes his part satisfied them, and stalks off; the sweetheart laughs that he is not really angry.

In front of Torchy, the friend loudly reports meeting the singer, who seemed to expect the boss's son to call and explain, and said as much.

The boss's son says he is now expected to explain the roses, will not believe the truth would convince her, and tells Torchy he must come and explain it himself.

On the drive the boss's son is gloomy and nervous, fearless in business but timid with women; they arrive and she greets him warmly.

She is poised; he blurts that he brought Torchy to explain the roses, and she coolly asks why he bothered coming himself, then asks to hear Torchy alone.

Alone with her, Torchy defends the boss's son as a good man who is simply clumsy with women, and tells her about the miniature and the roses.

Torchy says he meant to repay the boss's son for helping with his own romance, and asks why they parted.

She says she wrote him long letters from Italy and stopped when his replies bored her; back at the empty office after hours, Torchy digs out the boss's son's personal letter files.

The files show he answered her pages with short dictated business letters about the weather and his yacht; Torchy finds him moping at his club and reports she accepted the explanation.

The morning after Torchy urged him to sweep the singer off her feet, the boss's son comes in grim and tells Torchy he meant well, but it did not work.

He admits he took her in his arms, and she slipped away laughing, calling such caveman methods obsolete; he then tried a formal declaration.

She laughed at his impassioned speech too, calling devotion and protection outdated nonsense that would hinder her own development, and put him on probation; he still adores her.

They are to try friendship through concerts and a weekend sailing trip; Torchy suggests himself, his sweetheart and the boss's sister and her husband as the party, and the boss's son crams highbrow plays to impress her.

The dim son-in-law keeps barging in on the couple with botanical lectures, and Torchy is sent to steer him away and explain tactfully that he is not wanted.

The friend plans to resign; Torchy throws down the schoolbooks and calls him spineless, which stirs him to go that very night to try again in evening dress, with Torchy along.

The columnist lures the official out of the private dinner and introduces the friend as a famous athlete; the puzzled official says he has no interest in football and tries to back away.

The friend grabs him and walks him up and down the corridor delivering the sales pitch word-perfect, at times lifting him off his feet, while the rival hosts peer out anxiously.

He gets the official to sign an agreement on a notepad, returns him to his hosts, and tells Torchy he has the contract.

Sneaking past the sisters' house they are heard; the sisters ask which of them the serenade was for, and when the clerk cannot answer, Torchy holds him back and announces it was for Violet.

The clerk goes along with it, proposes next morning, and returns to work beaming: he is to marry Violet and live abroad, sister included, and he thanks Torchy, who asks only for the cornet.

Torchy confesses he was sent to spy for abuse, says the real problem is a spoiled child, and advises firmness; together they plan an approach, and next morning the bride asks why her breakfast isn't served.

The husband calmly puts her in charge of the house and servants, so nothing happens until she gives orders; she accepts, cooks a good breakfast, and Torchy reports back that the honeymoon just started late.

The suitor is being bandaged in the kitchen; Torchy sends the women back to keep the father busy and offers to see the young man away, but he says he came to see the girl and will not go.

The suitor says they are engaged, do not want the father's money, and he is not afraid; Torchy, won over, suggests he walk in and tell the father straight.

Torchy lectures him that fear is what beats most people and goads him; the suitor promptly marches into the library, where Torchy announces him and the girl gasps.

The father roars and threatens, but the suitor calmly announces they will marry next week, refuses to be thrown out, and says he would like some dinner.

The young man insists on doing it properly and begs Torchy to stay and support him; Torchy sends for the mother.

Torchy tells him bluntly he is hopeless at romance, gets him to admit he still loves her, and urges him to pursue her the way he goes after anything he wants in business.

Roused, the boss's son decides to write to her tonight; Torchy tells him his letters are the problem and to go in person, and he sets off at once.

The promoted friend is secretly terrified he is out of his depth; a broker's clerk fools him with an old office joke, and next evening Torchy finds him slumped, saying he has failed his first real test.

The top boss, resenting the promotion, sent the friend to win a big contract from a visiting foreign official; the friend was politely turned away by a secretary and gave up.

The boss's son admits Torchy's position has been ambiguous; pressed for time, he names him private secretary for a nominal subsidiary company, and Torchy moves into a desk in the inner office.

Torchy offers to resign the stopgap title, but the boss's son says the board has confirmed it and the desk is his for good.

On his first mornings as private secretary Torchy finds a polite new boy in his old seat at the gate, who calls him Sir; after four years of being called Boy, the respect braces him.

Needing papers, Torchy sends for the stiff senior clerk who used to order him about, and the man marches in rigidly formal and calls him Sir.

Torchy tells the clerk to drop the formality and offers his hand; the man thaws and coaches him like a big brother on the subsidiary's affairs. Then Torchy meets a cold, loud outside development manager.

The manager had wanted the post for his idle cousin and predicts Torchy will not last ten days; he then gets Torchy's only assignment, the inventor's proposal, moved into his own department.

Within minutes the manager dismisses the inventor as a crank and sends him off, making Torchy's enthusiasm look like a beginner's blunder, and Torchy sits brooding that he is just a dummy in the post.

With the boss's son away for a few days, Torchy is effectively running the office on his own, handling confidential matters and callers, and feels puffed up and important.

The old head of the firm walks in unannounced, having quit his health cure early and angry at being sidelined; he learns the family are away expecting him, and retreats into his room, long out of touch with the business.

Not knowing Torchy has been promoted, the old man orders him about as office boy, and Torchy goes along with it; finding him at a desk in the inner office, the old man demands an explanation.

Torchy explains his dummy-company post; the old man reserves judgement, then demands to know about a vital lease a partner firm has refused to renew, and the senior clerk blames the absent son.

The lease arrives signed before closing; the old man approves of Torchy's promotion and doubles his salary.

The boss's son explains that the break-up of the firm required many figurehead presidents; the old man says he knows nothing of the business, and the boss's son says his private secretary handles it all.

The old man refuses to hear a word, agrees his name may be used, and goes in to see the old boss; the boss's son explains he is a restless globetrotter who will soon be off again.

The aunt flees at the smell; Torchy notices the cousin has taken a stranger's cane by mistake on the subway and realises the crowd is following the cane.

The investigator counts the flowers, scolds the boss for throwing the earlier bunches away, and refuses to inspect doors or offices, claiming the trained mind finds the truth in the flowers alone.

With much solemn mumbo-jumbo the investigator establishes that the bouquets come every Wednesday, and declares the regularity a calculated threat.

Reading symbolism into the flowers, he announces that five desperate men are after the boss, predicts a blood-red bouquet next Wednesday, and orders three policemen hidden in the next room.

Torchy leaves uneasy: the investigator seems like a sideshow faker, yet he was right about the Wednesdays, and that night Torchy gets a hunch about what happens every Wednesday.

Torchy quietly checks with the building staff and makes a trip out of town; on the day, the boss grudgingly accepts two building guards on the clerk's urging and the investigator hides behind a screen.

Torchy waits on the fire escape outside; a red rose lands on the desk as predicted, and Torchy grabs the man who threw it and shoves him in through the window, telling everyone he is harmless.

Torchy explains plain reasoning: the windows are washed on Wednesdays and only a window cleaner could reach the desk; he traced the man through the building staff but could not learn his motive.

Stung, the inventor describes nine years of solitary work; Torchy makes him explain the process from first principles, and they talk chemistry until two in the morning.

Torchy writes up what he learned, goes back for more, and then tells the boss's son the manager is wrong; the boss's son, sceptical, asks if he wants to present a minority report.

Warned that the manager is a leading authority, Torchy still wants to speak; the boss's son sportingly gives him the floor at tomorrow's directors' meeting, unannounced, and Torchy rushes to prepare with the inventor.

The inventor agrees to spruce up; Torchy writes out his speech word for word and rehearses it alone in his room in plain language.

The manager delivers a crisp dismissal; Torchy freezes briefly, then speaks, laying out the scheme plainly with figures and answering each objection until the sternest director nods.

The money belonged to a wealthy widow who backs illegal betting; the arresting detective boasts the butler is a crank, showing a packet of sawdust found in his room.

The butler is anxious for his daughter and denies the theft, saying nothing was found on him; hearing he last saw her the night before, Torchy connects the sawdust to the doll.

The secretary sends Torchy urgently downtown with a letter and a package; on the way Torchy opens the letter and finds it orders a huge stock purchase secured with bonds from the company safe.

Torchy watches the stock swing all afternoon without delivering the bonds, unsure how to handle it without informing on the secretary or letting him try again.

Back at closing time he finds the secretary collapsed at his desk beside a newspaper reporting that the stock crashed in the last quarter hour.

Told the package was delivered on time, the secretary wails that he is ruined, begs Torchy to say he was led into it, and whines about his wife and child.

Torchy names the theft outright; the secretary confesses everything, including debts for a house and a car to keep up with the neighbours, and begs on his knees not to be reported.

Torchy reveals he never delivered the bonds; the boss's son, who overheard everything from his office, takes the bonds back, forgives the secretary and covers his loss, which was only forty dollars.

Enraged, Mr. Robert shakes the man until he collapses, then is ashamed; the wretch whimpers that he is dying and begs to be helped to die clean and decently dressed.

Transformed by the clothes, the man lounges at the club smoking Mr. Robert's cigarettes; Mr. Robert says he has not forgiven him for jilting a friend's sister at the altar to run off with an adventuress.

He mocks respectability and says he has friends in the bread line; he refuses to work, and when shown the door he instead asks for champagne and caviar, which Mr. Robert orders.

Torchy gets a jail pass, reflects that the widow will not let the money go, and visits the butler, a weak-chinned, dignified man.

Torchy warns him of fifteen years in prison and mentions the doll; the butler breaks down and agrees to any terms that get him out and take his daughter abroad.

The hard-headed widow at first wants him jailed, but agrees to drop the charge and pay the passage abroad if she gets every dollar back.

Torchy returns with the doll, which he had coaxed away from the child, and cuts it open before the angry widow to reveal the money sewn inside.

Torchy locks the certificates in a bank vault; the laid-off staff sneer at the boss as they leave, and the investigator returns, calls the boss a runaway, and Torchy insists he has gone to the mine.

The marshal says the company is a swindle and waits two weeks for the boss, who never returns; the office is stripped and Torchy, still loyal, worries how to face the boss for letting it close.

Torchy eggs them on; when the door opens, a calm, smiling man in a new beard faces the mob, and Torchy recognises his first beloved boss from the vanished mining company.

When payment is promised only for next month the crowd turns violent; Torchy barges through posing as a bank messenger with the empty document case, shouting that money has arrived.

Behind the locked partition the old boss admits he is cornered and tells Torchy to leave before he gets mixed up in it; Torchy refuses, out of gratitude for the shares he was once given.

The crowd moves into the corridor to organise; Torchy urges escape by an upper elevator, the old boss agrees to walk out rather than run, and a lookout raises the alarm.

The crowd and a guard catch them just as the top boss steps out of his meeting; the women call Torchy one of the gang, and he swears his old boss is honest, so the top boss vouches for them and orders the crowd away.

She is under age for work; she has no home, her English father was arrested three weeks ago, and he told her never to let herself be put in an institution.

When a store detective she fears reappears, Torchy takes her hand as if she is with him; his well-dressed sweetheart comes out and takes in the scene without scorn.

The child explains she ran away before her landlady could send her to a home and has eaten nothing all day; the sweetheart invites her to tea.

During a tense emergency directors' meeting the boss sends Torchy for the old clerk, and Torchy fears they mean to make him the scapegoat.

Torchy urges the old clerk to put up a front; he returns calmly and says he was only given instructions, but is now writing his resignation, which Torchy begs him to tear up.

The old man was told to alter his books to disguise the incriminating cheques; unaware of the scandal, he refuses simply because it would be a false entry and he has never made one.

Though resigning will leave him jobless and at his son-in-law's mercy, he signs the resignation; Torchy admires his nerve and delivers it to the top boss.

Amid slumping stock and strikes, the gout-ridden boss quarrels with the firm's indispensable ore partner and wires him to 'go sew his head in a bag'; Torchy shows the message to the head clerk, who is appalled.

Nobody dares tell the boss not to send it; the partner threatens to resign and stir up a revolt, then the boss falls ill with flu and is confined at home, leaving Mr. Robert frantic.

The boss rants about being a useless old wreck; Torchy teases that his temper is mostly bluff, which pleases him, and is then ordered to throw all his medicines out of the window.

The reporter has just been assigned to cover the poet's tea party, and bitterly says the poet is his own invention, a joke he built up in print, and his new editor is taking the fraud seriously.

Torchy watches the boss's moods follow the mail; after a slack spell with only a complaining investor writing in, a federal investigator comes round asking questions, and Torchy stalls him and tells the boss.

Delivering a note to the groom's house, Torchy is treated as a likely thief by the sharp-eyed aunt until she learns who he is, when she abruptly turns sweet.

The aunt sits him down with cake and lemonade and flatters him with praise from the couple, then begins asking about the bride.

Torchy lets slip everything he knows about the bride's background; the aunt telephones people in her home town, learns the bride has a brother in the state penitentiary, and shows Torchy out.

The pious sister starts on his moral training and asks if he swears; he says he gave it up after hearing the top boss, her cousin, swear like an artist when his gout is bad, and she is shocked.

The artist looks puzzled and the sister stifles giggles, so Torchy retreats downstairs to a room full of hunting trophies, where a sunburnt old man in a wheelchair rolls in and demands to know who he is.

Torchy breezily tells the old man he has just bought a painting at the artist's sale upstairs; the old man, clearly angry at this news, has the butler summon the couple and blocks Torchy from leaving.

While he is out his gentle wife and small son arrive to take him shopping; Torchy makes friends with the boy and wonders how such a man won such a wife.

The boy is promised new shoes; Torchy, a poor liar, tells the wife her husband is busy with a big deal downtown, and she glows with pride.

Rather than disappoint the boy, Torchy slips ten dollars of his own into an envelope as if from the father; the secretary returns sweating and wretched.

Torchy phones the son's valet, learns he left in formal afternoon dress, and concludes it is a social call; the boss guesses it is the young violinist he has been neglecting business for, and Torchy finds a cryptic appointment on the son's desk pad.

Torchy retreats, creeps round the veranda to the son, who is gazing at the violinist, and whispers the contract warning; the son says he cannot possibly leave in the middle of her performance.

The son says where the contracts are; Torchy offers to phone the office to deal with it, and is told to wait in the garden until the concert ends.

Torchy says he had the secretary send the contracts quietly so the son need only act innocent; her photograph arrives, the pious sister disapproves, and the widow identifies the girl as a family friend's heiress and buys a silver frame.

With the boss's son neglecting work to court the singer, the old boss grumbles at his absence and asks Torchy how long the romance will take; Torchy says he is doing well now.

The old boss asks, drily, when his son might return to business; Torchy predicts a crisis at the boss's daughter's weekend house party, where the couple are to be left alone together.

They blame the often-absent boss's son for the loss of a vital ship charter and want him to resign; he breezes in, beaming, to tell Torchy the singer has accepted him, and Torchy warns him of the angry group.

Leaving the club with Mr. Robert's reply, Torchy is followed by a ragged, drink-smelling beggar who claims to be an old friend of 'Bob Ellins' and knows the club doorman's name.

The beggar says he is too ashamed to face Mr. Robert himself and asks Torchy for five dollars, then two, then fifty cents, giving a name to pass on; Torchy stalls and goes to send the message while the man waits.

Unsure whether to believe him, Torchy phones Mr. Robert, who is shocked that his friend should be begging and says he will come at once, telling Torchy to hold the man and say nothing.

He tells the boss's son, who is worried by it; then a flashy small-time broker Torchy knows fishes for inside information from his new post and asks where the rival firm's offices are.

Torchy brushes him off with a joke and the broker leaves, claiming he is only visiting a cousin who keeps books for the rival firm.

Torchy tails him, sees a stranger slip him a note, which he reads and tears up; Torchy fishes the pieces from the wastebasket and reassembles a cryptic message naming the rival firm's two leaders.

Soon after his elderly aunt's elopement, a stranger in a seedy raincoat with a flashy cane calls at the office asking for Torchy by his nickname, and settles in with a charming smile.

The stranger, admiring the office, says he has a proposition in municipal franchises; Torchy says the firm does not deal in such things.

The man describes himself as a legitimate promoter who does the hard work of setting up transport franchises in southern towns.

He complains no one with money will see him and asks Torchy simply to introduce him to wealthy men; Torchy asks who told him he was such an easy mark.

The man offers to tell Torchy about his family only after Torchy lends him two hundred dollars and introduces him to rich investors; Torchy stalls and invites him home.

The furious top boss sends Torchy to fetch whoever typed a badly misspelled letter; she comes along perfectly calm, as if invited to tea, while Torchy promises to defend her.

The boss starts to roar about her spelling, looks up, sees how striking she is and loses his temper entirely; she calmly complains that his marks mean she must retype it.

After a quiet week the top boss suddenly throws the office into a panic, grilling every department head in turn; Torchy, unimpressed after his newspaper days, takes his time answering the boss's shouts.

The boss asks if Torchy knows where his son is, admits the company will lose a lot of money unless the son is found by four-thirty, and grudgingly lets Torchy think about it.

The young people say they only came to thank him for managing their late father's small estate; the girl suddenly hugs the boss and kisses his bald head, and instead of exploding he softens.

Mr. Robert sends Torchy to the boss's house with papers, partly because Torchy tends to cheer the old man up; Torchy finds him limping about the library in a rage.

Torchy smashes all the medicine in the areaway; the boss, bored and miserable after four days indoors, demands something to do, and when Torchy suggests games he is sent off with twenty dollars to buy some.

Torchy buys a heap of toys with a salesman's help and returns to find the doctor furious about the medicines; the boss cuts him off by showing off 'Torchy's drug substitute'.

For three days the boss's son has treated Torchy with cold, injured dignity over the roses; then a tactless, fat club friend of the boss's son drops into the office.

The newcomer's father arrives and takes him away: the mother, alarmed by the company he keeps, has him sent abroad for a year, and Torchy realises his own glowing report cost him the job.

The old man is the wife's rich invalid uncle; he confronts the couple for running a studio and sales in his house against his wishes, and the wife says painting is her husband's life's work.

The uncle says painting is not man's work and gives them a choice: stop or leave; the artist calmly chooses to leave, and the wife tells the uncle she hates him for his nagging suspicion.

The artist apologises for deceiving the uncle, says he could not live idly on his money, and prepares to leave at once with a handshake.

The uncle, won over by the young man's spine, admits he has been selfish and bitter since being crippled after a lifetime of exploring, asks forgiveness, and the wife embraces him.

The clerk explains he was raised in luxury abroad until his father's business collapsed and both parents died, leaving him penniless; his shrewd aunt, who saved her fortune and made more in property, rescued him.

The aunt insists he work at something steady, so he is stuck in a dull clerk's job he hates and feels he deserves; he adds that two large spinster neighbours are coming to dinner.

He blushingly admits his aunt is matchmaking between him and the neighbours, but says he could never marry or propose, being such a duffer, then abruptly clams up.

Dinner is stiff and dull; the aunt, seeing her plan stalling, has champagne opened and makes her nephew drink, while turning down Torchy's glass.

She questions him and learns he is an orphan with no lodging who works at the trust; she lets him fetch his bags alone to see if he will run, and he comes back, saying he trusted her to be fair.

Pleased, the grandmother, a widow, invites him to dinner over her pious sister's protests and lets him wash up in her absent son's rooms, kept unchanged for twenty years.

Left unwatched among valuables, Torchy enjoys a fine dinner, blunders only over grace, and finds the grandmother a lively free-thinker who scorns churches, charity and society.

She says she collects unbelievers of every kind for dinner-table argument and laughs at his irreverence; he tells her he is homeless, and next day learns from the boss's son that she is the top boss's cousin.

Now boarding with the elderly widow, Torchy gets on well with her lively ways, and describes her old-fashioned, deeply pious sister, who has started including him in her prayers.

A week later Torchy is at the theatre with one of the two elderly ladies who took him into their home years ago; he describes their old-fashioned house.

He describes his two adopted aunts: one slow and relentlessly pious, who reads scripture to him twice a week, and the other lively and modern.

The lively aunt goes to concerts and radical meetings, looks after his clothes without preaching, talks to him as an equal, and joins him in teasing her sister.

Torchy finds his new great-uncle gruff on the surface but boyish and kind, teasing the pious aunt at breakfast and disguising his good turns with jokes.

The uncle surprises his bride with an expensive car and chauffeur, then asks Torchy to take the car out for the afternoon to keep the chauffeur happy, hinting he might take a companion.

The aunt finds the brother's penitentiary address on the guest list and asks the boss's son to break the match; the shy groom refuses flatly, and the son backs him.

The aunt, who fears losing her place running the groom's household, berates the boss's son by telephone; he stands by the couple, and a small quiet noon wedding goes ahead.

The friend answers in his shirtsleeves; the bride runs from the kitchen in a party dress and apron and throws herself on her mother, upsetting the senator's plan for a short formal call.

The hostess and her daughter seem jumpy, his sweetheart stays out of sight with the other girls, and the son-in-law tells Torchy a man is the cause.

The daughter's young engineer sweetheart, once thrown out and banned by her tyrannical father, has sent word he will try again; nobody dares tell the father.

At a jolly dinner, a crash of glass outside alarms everyone but the host; his wife soothes him and goes to look herself.

The father collapses into a chair beaten while the women feed the suitor; his wife coaxes him with cigars and news that the wedding is put off two weeks.

She shoos him out at midnight; next day the pious sister waits grimly, the lively one fails to come home to dinner, and a telegram announces the two have eloped.

The pious sister sobs that forty years ago she stopped the same pair eloping when her sister was engaged to a clergyman; Torchy gives the elderly couple his blessing.

He has been saving hard, skipping social life and teaching immigrants in the evenings; she stopped writing when he gave no reason, but she is now in town for a farewell dance before sailing, and he is invited.

He decides not to go, but next morning appears beaming in formal dress and tells Torchy he has just married her.

Torchy teases him about chasing a chorus girl; the visitor says she is an old friend who was a waitress back home under another name, and that he has to find her.

The visitor explains that he courted the waitress for months but was too busy with his newly bought business to propose in time.

On a night he forgot a date with her, she left with a friend to audition for a city show and was hired; he has had no word from her since, and has now bought a ring to offer her.

Undaunted, the visitor wants to offer her the ring; an usher friend of Torchy's takes a note backstage, but she tosses it aside unread and is off to a late supper with a wealthy admirer.

Barred from the fancy supper club for lack of evening clothes, the visitor insists on waiting outside for her, and Torchy stays with him while the night's crowd comes and goes.

After midnight she comes out on the arm of the old rich man; the visitor steps up to explain himself, and she recognises him and laughs coldly in his face.

At the play a man in a box keeps watching them through opera glasses; the aunt jokes she has an admirer.

Torchy recognises the watcher as his absentee figurehead boss; at home, as Torchy returns with late-night sausage sandwiches, the old man arrives in a taxi and asks about the lady.

The old man asks whether she is still lively and whether her sister is alive; the aunt calls him in, and they meet for the first time in forty years.

The three eat sausage sandwiches with beer; the aunt teases him, and he recalls an August night long ago.

They toast that night; he says he has never forgiven her pious sister for what she did then, and he hints why he acted as he did long ago.

The boss's son blushes and admits she jilted him, not the reverse; Torchy is astonished, since he is one of the most eligible bachelors in town.

He dwells fondly on her face, then declares it hopeless and tells Torchy to put the dusty case back in the drawer or the wastebasket.

The aunt demands how long since he got out of prison; the bewildered brother is rescued when a visiting clergyman arrives and greets him warmly as an old friend.

The brother turns out to be a minister serving as a prison chaplain; the aunt grovels, Torchy gets him back in time for the end of the wedding, and the brother bears no grudge.

A snobbish new junior clerk in the bond room, a rich man's son, coldly snubs Torchy's friendly offer to show him a cheap lunch place, saying he lunches at his club.

Torchy stakes him to lunch and refuses his stickpin as security; the newcomer sneers at the cheap, crowded lunch places and the working people in them.

Within two weeks the newcomer is enthusing about his fellow boarders: a hard-working aspiring cartoonist and an old man who has travelled the world.

Torchy lets him wait on the bench; the head clerk sneers that waiters are the spineless scum of mankind, and Torchy mocks his snobbery.

Torchy retells the war story to the head clerk, who gushes about the nameless hero; then Mr. Robert and the friend come out discussing the banquet.

Torchy rubs it in to the snobbish head clerk; the waiter serves as head waiter at the banquet where he is toasted, and Mr. Robert buys him a half share in a florist's shop so he can marry his sweetheart.

The guest scorns her unrefined mother; Torchy's sweetheart is going to stay with her, and hints that Torchy may visit, teasing him about the rival's constant presence.

The mother, rough, over-jewelled and defensive, at first addresses Torchy by mistake; then the young man asks formally for her daughter's hand.

Touched that he came to her first, the mother softens and weeps, admits she spoiled her daughter, and asks him to tell the girl her old mother still loves her.

A stout, expert clerk serves them; the aunt recognises him as a poor boy from her childhood town who used to ask her to skate, and recalls something odd about his family.

She patronises him about his lowly job and large family and offers her niece's cast-off clothes, while he answers meekly.

A chauffeur arrives with telegrams for him, and he admits the limousine and the store are his; he is the very merchant she wanted to reach.

He explains he owns nearly a hundred stores and was filling in for a sick manager; he takes Torchy for her son, and she asks whether he means to retire from such petty work.

He says his business, with thousands of employees, feeds poor people honestly at a small profit and is neither petty nor sordid, and he will not retire.

He drives them back in his car, views the sculptures, declines to attend as being from the wrong end of town, orders four bronzes and leaves a large cheque.

The grumblers catch his mood and collect for a wedding present; the singer's snobbish cousin, who had shunned her as a performer, now offers her grand country house for a society wedding.

Just fired from his last place, Torchy walks into a new office tower looking for an office-boy job; the lobby starter mocks him and sends him up to a corridor already packed with boys answering the same advertisement.

Torchy brushes past the jeering queue and gets into the office first, finding a tiny two-room outfit with a grand name, a typist and a fussy clerk who tries to send him back out.

Liking the look of the easygoing boss, Torchy takes down the 'boy wanted' sign, tells the waiting crowd the job is filled, and locks them out while they hammer on the door.

The boss hires him at five dollars a week; the work turns out to be folding circulars and posting them, and Torchy teases the anxious, fussy bookkeeper.

Torchy describes the vain typist who treats him as barely human, and notices that almost no customers ever come in; the business lives by mail, and he is thrilled by the gold-mine circulars.

Torchy retells the circular's lurid legend of a hidden mine whose map passed through many hands down to a travelling salesman.

The circular says the finder got religion and wants to share the gold with ministers, so the company sells cheap shares only to preachers; Torchy is amazed so few of them bite.

The boss praises him, then that evening flatters him, announces a sudden trip west, and dismisses the other two staff; Torchy begs to be left in charge of the office.

Torchy mentions wanting to buy some of the stock; the boss hands him a hundred shares on the spot against a small raise docked from his pay, then leaves him with two weeks' wages.

Broke and hungry, with worthless shares in a vault, Torchy leaves a note for the boss and goes looking for another job.

Torchy is now the gate boy at a big trust, screening visitors for the fussy private secretary; he got the job because the vice-president, passing through the applicant line-up, pointed at his red hair and said 'take that one'.

The heir explains that at his club he was teased into a large bet that he could shoot a deer with an antique flintlock, though he knew nothing about hunting.

He learned to shoot in the woods, killed a deer out of season, and shipped it under a false name; his friends tipped off the game wardens, who tracked the parcel with dogs.

The daughter, just home from finishing school, has heard about Torchy from her brother and treats him like one of the family; they become friendly over several visits.

Torchy ends up enjoying the play; the daughter swoons over the love scene and confides she is sure she could play the heroine, having been denied a part at school.

The teacher gloats that rich pupils pay whatever their talent, calls her a baby elephant and says her acting would make angels weep.

The boss corrects her gently, holds the door for her, and quietly assigns a plain, expert typist to fix her work; she keeps coming in whenever she likes and brushes off the secretary's rebuke about hours.

Everyone agrees she should be fired, but the boss and his son pass the task down to the secretary, who is so polite that she talks him into promising her a raise; the male clerks court her in vain.

Torchy enjoys insulting the boss's son's haughty chauffeur; one evening he is sent down to tell the chauffeur to wait half an hour.

In the sleet the typist comes out, and on a whim Torchy bows her into the boss's son's car and orders the chauffeur to drive her home; she plays along without a question.

Too late, Torchy sees the boss's son's painfully shy, plump friend already sitting in the car; he introduces them anyway and slams the door on the friend's protests.

Torchy describes the pompous private secretary as a loyal, small-minded long-serving clerk who makes a great show of any bigger task; one morning he orders Torchy to phone for the opening price of a speculative stock.

The secretary holds whispered meetings with a seedy tipster, then grows visibly frantic, washing his hands and drinking water, and leaves early saying he may be back late.

Torchy sees the cousin as an idle heir playing at architecture, who stops anyone in the street for directions and is never discouraged by being snubbed.

The secretary sends Torchy with forgotten papers to the top boss at a directors' meeting in another building, warning him not to talk to suspicious characters; after delivering them Torchy hears a commotion on the floor below.

Curious, Torchy finds a crowd of angry working women besieging the locked door of a doubtful high-interest investment firm, shouting that they have been cheated.

The women abuse the man as a swindler; he lets them shout themselves out, then smoothly announces an extra dividend voted by the board.

A lovely, spirited girl scolds the sullen boy who brought her for hiding in the cloakroom instead of dancing; he dares her to tell on him, and Torchy butts in advising him to dance with her.

Torchy publicly accuses his nosy landlady's husband of borrowing his good suit without asking; the landlady throws a fit, and a few days later he comes home to find his things in the hall and a new lodger in his room.

Almost broke, having banked his savings on his friend's advice, Torchy goes to find the friend for a loan; passing a quiet respectable house he is squirted with water and lies in wait in the vestibule.

He forces his way in and chases a spoiled twelve-year-old with a squirt gun into the parlour, where the boy hides behind a heavy old lady who mildly tells Torchy not to speak ill of the child.

The old lady turns out to be tied to her chair by the boy, who has been squirting her too; Torchy chases the boy down and is soaking him with his own gun when two more women walk in.

The boy's shrewd grandmother refuses to call the police without facts, while the boy tells ever-worse lies; the mother, insulted that the grandmother won't take her son's side, storms off with him.

The boss's son already knows of the incident; Torchy tells him he won the argument and is now staying with the old lady as a trial boarder, leaving the son open-mouthed.

At dinner the boss orders cocktails and wine and is offered buttermilk; the pious proprietor gently reproves him for raising his voice.

No coffee, smoking only at set hours, no billiards and no cards; Torchy tours the dull, hushed house while the boss fumes.

Told lights go out at nine forty-five, the boss orders his car for the morning and threatens to build a rowdy hotel next door; the proprietor calmly points to the clock.

Unable to sleep in the silence, Torchy looks out of his window and sees the proprietor in the basement playing poker with his staff and drinking from a decanter.

Torchy leads the boss to the game; the boss joins it, forgives Torchy, and leaves next morning cheerful, tearing up the proprietor's gambling debts.

A state bribery investigation implicates the company through some cheques; the boss's son frets about his club friends, the top boss says let them prove it, and Torchy teases the flustered secretary.

Ordered to bring the man in next morning and tell no one, Torchy travels to a grim factory town, where the man's hostile sister says he is probably in the factory yard.

The man, living secretly in a shed in the yard, will sell cheap, for just the two thousand he needs; he says the shed is where he expected to die.

He tells how the factory wore out his inventor father and has given him consumption; he gave up factory work to build a dream machine, and shows Torchy a flying machine in the dark.

He has spent his last dollar on the aeroplane and needs money for an engine; Torchy urges him to sell the option and go somewhere healthy, and tells the boss, who cares only about the price.

The deal goes through; the man has spent it all on an engine and has flown briefly; then the factory owner's rich son and a technical expert walk in to inspect the machine.

The expert doubts the design, but the owner's son, who knew the inventor's father as foreman, demands to buy it at once; the inventor refuses to sell.

The heir offers a thousand, then five thousand; the inventor furiously says the factory killed his father and he will not be robbed of his one dream; the heir gives him twenty-four hours to sell or be evicted.

The inventor says he is dying and wants no money; he means to fly out over the sea at sunrise and climb until the fuel runs out.

Torchy begs him to fly briefly and take the money; the inventor sends a farewell card and disappears with the machine, and Torchy is left haunted, not daring to think what happened.

Ashore on the island she met a handsome, sun-tanned young man she took for a local fisherman and nicknamed after a Greek god.

She flirted with him for three days, and he said little about himself; his old uncle let them be, and she sailed away laughing, thinking she had left him heartbroken.

Back in society she found she could not forget him, so she sent the uncle money to visit the city and bring his nephew; they arrive this afternoon, and she cannot meet the train herself.

The girls come down eager; the friend recognises the uncle but is horrified when Torchy points out the yawning nephew as her supposed island hero.

A handsome guest overhears and greets her; he is the real man from the island, a society painter the boss's daughter knows, who was only holidaying there and calls the old man uncle as all the summer people do.

She is mortified at what she called him, but he says it flattered him; they hold hands, and she tells Torchy to send the unwanted nephew off to bed.

Torchy waits in the eager pier crowd as the ship is warped in, and spots the boss's large daughter at the rail.

Not a scene: the publisher's back-matter advertising other adventure novels, split in with the last story of the volume.

The head clerk explains that bouquets have appeared on the boss's desk four times in broad daylight with nobody seen; Torchy suggests a lovesick typist, the clerk names one, and the boss scoffs that it is more likely someone wanting a raise.

The culprit is a frail, meek old window cleaner who apologises; the boss asks how Torchy ever worked it out.

The old man says his son-in-law is always running the boss down as a bloodsucker, so to relieve his feelings he has been bringing the boss flowers as a secret tribute to a man he admires.

Torchy finds her name in a theatre programme, and they catch the show, where she stands out glamorously in the chorus; the visitor stares at her the whole time.

Torchy gets back at him by blocking the gate and pretending not to know him; the newcomer keeps arriving late, his department head demands he be fired, and the boss reveals he promised the boy's father, a big stockholder, a three-month trial.

The boss tells the department head to dock the newcomer's pay and pile on work; then the newcomer's gushing mother comes to say goodbye before sailing for Europe, fretting over her son's hardship at a humble job.

Torchy ushers them in, warning them not to be jokey; the girl teases him, and the boss keeps them standing, then trades dry remarks with her.

For days the wards are models of courtesy at the boss's house, and the boss holds them up as examples; Torchy, sent there on errands, finds himself being politer at work too.

Waiting in the library, Torchy sees the model pair squabble viciously over whether the sister may drive the car, ending with her slapping her brother and pulling his hair.

The boss plays with the ring toss and air-gun while the doctor scoffs, breaks a cabinet door, and then unpacks an indoor putting green.

The doctor is drawn in, the two bet on putts, and soon they have laid out a golf course across the whole ground floor with the butler and Torchy as caddies.

The boss teaches his friends Torchy's chant to greet the directors, who take it as a joke and join a foursome; then the offended partner storms in, and the boss has everyone chant at him.

The partner demands an explanation; the boss drafts him into the game, withdraws the insult as gout talking, and wagers that if the partner wins he gets his way in their dispute.

Torchy tells a baffled Mr. Robert by phone that the crisis is being settled by indoor golf; the partner wins, the two old men laugh and drink together, and next day the boss gives Torchy a caddie's tip.

Torchy gathers the sister once fancied the artist before he married a poor girl whose rich uncle they now live with; the show is held in a studio carved out of the uncle's top floor.

At the crowded, arty reception the artist's showy wife makes a catty remark about the stout sister, but the artist's gentle charm soon smooths things over.

Shown the paintings, the uncle asks why the artist paints such dull scenes, and starts describing the wonderful places abroad he could take him to paint.

The uncle proposes an expedition abroad with the couple, which they joyfully accept; he rewards Torchy for his loose talk with his prize leopard skin.

They share the gumdrops; she turns out to be sixteen and chatters knowingly about racy plays, divorces and novels.

Arriving, Gladys clings to Torchy's arm to make an entrance before Marjorie and Vee, who stare; Marjorie hardly recognises her, and Gladys gushes about her 'sport' with 'dear Torchy'.

Gladys's quiet, modest mother is shocked at her looks and pleads; Gladys defies her, and the father, asked to intervene, flees round the corner with a cigar.

The mother weeps; Vee offers Gladys a mirror and washcloth, which she angrily refuses, so Vee, Marjorie and the mother withdraw into the house together.

The mother returns made up exactly like her daughter, in a blond wig and earrings; appalled at seeing her mother look so vulgar, Gladys breaks down and starts scrubbing her own face.

Mother and daughter strip off the paint together and embrace; later Torchy sheepishly holds the car door for Vee, who pretends to be cold but is plainly amused.

Called into Mr. Robert's office, Torchy finds his friend, a former junior now an assistant manager married to a senator's daughter, back from Greece where he joined the war effort on a whim.

The friend rebuilt a war-damaged railway for the Greek army and came back with a huge steel contract for the firm, and a celebratory directors' banquet is planned in his honour.

Torchy lingers to listen as the friend describes the wrecked railway and how he wandered off alone toward the front, got lost at night, and slept in a sheep pen.

At dawn the friend came upon a lone soldier manning a machine gun on a hill, his comrades all killed or wounded, who calmly drove back an infantry charge while the friend lay flat.

Torchy takes the invitation as kindness and accepts with a joke; the clerk later hints shyly that two ladies are coming to dinner and he should bring dark clothes.

Torchy packs full evening dress to surprise his host, but is himself surprised to find the clerk lives in a grand estate with a butler, as his aunt's heir 'under certain conditions'.

The clerk admires Torchy's evening clothes; the wiry, shrewd aunt sizes Torchy up with one glance, and the two sisters prove enormous, with the slight clerk wedged between them at table.

After a toast the clerk livens up, describes European cities, agrees that ladies need an escort abroad, and cracks jokes that make the sisters shake with laughter.

He plays piano after dinner and walks the sisters home; the aunt sends Torchy to bed, and from his window Torchy hears the clerk sneak out again.

A cornet plays love songs from the waterfront; the aunt, guessing it is her nephew making a fool of himself, sends Torchy out to order him home to bed.

Torchy crashes through a hedge and a vegetable garden and finds the clerk playing the cornet on the neighbours' wharf; he begs Torchy not to tell his aunt and denies it is a serenade.

The clerk says the champagne made him restless and he only wanted to let off steam where nobody would hear; Torchy says the whole shore heard, and he is horrified the sisters will think it a serenade.

The man coolly admits he is a cad, says everyone knew the bride was too good for him, and says the adventuress used him as prey but he would still go back to her.

He recounts how he ran through an inheritance, was abandoned by the adventuress in Paris and cut off by his father, then worked as a stoker, pot-scrubber and steward among the poorest men on the world's docks.

When Mr. Robert threatens to throw him out, the man says that now he is dressed as a gentleman he could make a public scandal, openly threatening blackmail, but adds that he has a proposal.

A ticket clerk teases him that the place on the card is not a station and sells him a route north; Torchy rides the overnight express in high spirits.

Torchy and the pilot trade tall tales, the locals spinning yarns about lobsters and rocks and Torchy matching them with city nonsense.

Heading out as the rich heir's stand-in boatman, Torchy learns the picnic guests are from the house, including Vee and possibly the aunt, and sizes up the restless, slightly pompous heir.

At the wedding of Mr. Robert's goddaughter, her lively mother openly says she is glad it is over, and the groom looks most relieved of all after a tangled courtship.

The bride was a beautiful, prankish girl juggling several suitors; the rich, idle groom, then half-engaged to her school friend, fell for her at first sight and rushed her with his racing car and dancing.

She hesitated over his ring while keeping two other suitors busy in turns, and her mother and Mr. Robert laughed it off, since she was barely nineteen.

Her father called the suitor an impudent puppy and her mother wept; the girl sulked for a week, then agreed only when a friend described a romantic lawn wedding, and set the date for two weeks later.

Torchy recognises the visitor as a notorious railway president, battered by legislatures, indictments and angry shareholders, arriving calm and sardonic for a showdown with the boss.

The head clerk fusses all day, then forgets vital papers; Torchy takes them in mid-meeting and hears the boss demand whether the rival will drop a competing trolley line, and the rival say it is up to his agent.

Near the farm the agent stops for a crying little girl who has lost her birthday nickel, comforts her, and buys her a big box of chocolates.

After a flat tyre they reach the old farmer, who refuses to sell because his wife and children are buried on the land and he wants to lie there in peace.

The agent asks only for a strip on the far side, candidly admits his backers' bad reputation, and eloquently explains how the line would benefit the district; the farmer still refuses.

He tells of his own farm boyhood and how the railway transformed it; still refused, he is interrupted when the farmer's daughter runs out and recognises him as the man who bought her chocolates.

The railway president resigns within a week; the agent now meets the boss as an ally, and the firm backs the trolley line.

The reporter says anyone can pay to print a book, that he steered the poet to a vanity press for a commission and even padded his verses; Torchy remembers the poet as a soft-spoken 'mushbag'.

The reporter explains that the poet craved publicity and that he wrote the flattering feature and coined the 'sculptor poet' tag as a joke, which stuck until everyone believed it.

The poet actually lives off cheese factories inherited from his father and cooled toward the reporter after losing money in his stock tips; learning of the widow, the reporter plots to wreck the romance for revenge.

The poet enters in a monk's robe and sandals, is gushed over by the cousin, and greets the resentful reporter with warm, unashamed friendliness.

The reporter admits the joke; the poet, delighted, thanks him for freeing him from a widow who had been pursuing him for weeks, and showers them with cigars and photos.

Torchy tactfully offers to pay for smartening up the shabby inventor for the directors, and the old man pulls out a thick roll of banknotes.

After a sleepless night Torchy has the speech pat; the inventor arrives transformed into a smartly tailored gentleman.

He decodes it: one leader is leaving, the other is unloading, and the backwards phrase means get out from under. The boss's son sees that the rival's stock is about to slump, which will hurt the aunt badly.

Her lawyers do not know if she has signed; the stock is falling, and Torchy is sent to find and warn her. The maid, caught wearing the girl's hat, trades the aunt's whereabouts for his silence.

The aunt is at a remote country house party; slow branch-line trains strand him, and he reaches the village at two in the morning and sleeps on a baggage truck.

At dawn he writes a note begging the girl to stop the aunt signing, learns the whole party is out on a yacht, and goes back for an old boat he saw tied up in a creek.

Paddling out, he gives a lift to a young man carrying fuel to a brand-new flying boat he has kept secret from his family; Torchy says he would never go up in it.

When the young man points out the yacht carrying his own parents, and Torchy's sweetheart and her aunt, Torchy begs to fly along, saying he will risk his neck to reach the girl.

They take off across the water at speed and lift into the air; Torchy clings to a strut in terror.

His fear fades into delight at the smooth flight; they swing wide of the yacht and he cannot make himself heard over the engine.

They climb and dive, then circle back to the yacht; Torchy stuffs his note into a melon he happened to bring so he can drop it on deck.

He drops the melon on deck as the girl runs to it; the pilot shouts to his mother on board, who faints, and they land back by the dock.

The file shows only a polite request and a refusal; the lease expires tomorrow, and the old man realises a powerful, reclusive financier he has fought before is behind it, and rouses himself for battle.

He has the whole office in a frenzy for hours preparing, then tells Torchy to come along to see the financier.

The ruse works; the financier comes out expecting the birds, recognises his old rival, and is annoyed to learn how they got in.

The financier squirms and refuses until the old man threatens foreclosure on a defaulted bond issue he holds; the financier gives way and admires the birds, which the old man says are Torchy's gift.

The wife passes the crash off as a stranger breaking a frame; after dinner the women slip away one by one, and the boss's daughter tells Torchy the banned suitor has arrived and fell into the glass.

The father gives in, grumbling only about the church; the sweetheart, who overheard Torchy coaching the suitor, praises him on the veranda.

A year earlier the man had been thrown out of the boss's house for badgering his sister, a maid there, for money, and swore he would show his family some day.

A new, vacant-looking typist is tried on the boss's son's dictation and types out every aside word for word, including his instructions to her.

Raised by a clergyman uncle, she worked her way through college meaning to become a missionary; her sweetheart gave up a good job to follow her and try to stop her going. Then Torchy goes to find the boss's son at his club.

At the club a successful playwright friend of the boss's son complains that no actress can play a part he wrote around a strange, plain woman he once met.

He describes a clumsy new waitress at a remote summer hotel who obeyed every request to the letter, serving even ice cream on hot plates.

She would stand and stare at him while he ate; told to look elsewhere, she stared at the ceiling instead, and her blank, awkward plainness fascinated him.

He wrote her into the play until it centred on her; he traced the hotel but not her, and the boss's son bets him dinner that Torchy can find her.

From the description and the Midwest detail, Torchy guesses it is the new typist; the playwright recognises her, and she is called into the private office, as wooden as ever.

She does not recognise the playwright until he mentions hot plates; then she recites all his fussy preferences, and he realises she had been staring to memorise his wishes.

He apologises and offers her the part at a large salary, but she refuses because she means to be a missionary; Torchy says he and her sweetheart will persuade her.

Together they talk her into signing; she plays herself and packs the theatre, and her sweetheart, now doing well, gets the contract for the sign bearing her name.

Waiting in a department-store entrance for his sweetheart, Torchy is approached by a thin, shabby, well-mannered little girl who asks whether it is true she needs work papers to get a job.

Over tea the child says her father was head butler to an English officer until the war closed the house, and came to America for work; he is accused of stealing a large sum.

The child insists her father is innocent and says he had just found a way to take her to a relative's ranch overseas; Torchy is doubtful, but the sweetheart backs the child, who then shows her battered doll.

The doll went missing the night before the arrest and reappeared beside her; the sweetheart decides to take the child home despite her aunt, and orders Torchy to find the father and get him freed.

The widow counts the money, forgives the butler and has the case dropped; the child, who won over the aunt through her cat, is reunited with her father, and the sweetheart kisses Torchy.

With the aunt watching Torchy sternly, the violinist fusses imperiously over the flowers, the draughts and his strings before playing.

The sportswoman sobs that the violinist called her a meddling old maid, and that she loves him; Torchy tells the violinist someone in the library needs him, and he rushes off eagerly.

A week later the violinist is warm and cordial to Torchy and is escorting the sportswoman out, clearly courting her.

The man says the woman who raised Torchy as a child gave his address, and reveals he is the uncle who left four-year-old Torchy in her care.

He explains he was broke and had to rush south for a business boom, promising to send for the boy; the boom collapsed and he drifted from job to job.

He never came back; Torchy asks if he is really his uncle, and is unimpressed, but cannot bring himself to reject the only relative who has ever appeared.

The woman who raised him confirms the man is the one; at home the pious aunt has packed to leave rather than live with her sister's new husband, and assumes Torchy must go too.

The pious aunt sits at dinner in her hat, ready to leave; the eloped couple burst in, and the bride demands to know why her sister is dressed to go.

The bride forbids either of them to leave and has her husband make peace by kissing the pious sister and apologising for the past; the household settles down happily together.

Over coffee the new husband tells how his brother disinherited his son for marrying a clever red-haired girl from the office, and how the young couple eloped to Paris.

The feckless nephew went west chasing mining deals, taking his lively red-haired little boy away from the mother, who stayed to run their business.

The nephew died suddenly, and the boy was never found; just then the doorbell rings, and Torchy, embarrassed, brings his newly found uncle into the library.

The new husband recognises the visitor from the voyage and demands where the lost boy was left; the visitor admits he was entrusted with him, and says Torchy is the boy.

A locket Torchy has always kept holds his mother's picture; the old man tells of her later remarriage and death in the war, the aunt comforts Torchy, and the impostor is shown out.

Torchy thinks he has no family left, but the old man, his nominal company president, claims him as his great-nephew, and Torchy happily accepts.

Distracted, the boss's son leaves the boat's preparations to his captain and ships only the books; at the club the party finds the boat unmanned.

A note says the captain left days ago; the boss's son offers to sail with the guests as amateur crew, and everyone, including the singer, agrees.

The guests haul on ropes, the son-in-law in yellow gloves; the boss's son, in paint-spattered clothes, sails hard and barks orders instead of talking literature, and the singer watches him curiously.

As the wind rises, Torchy's sweetheart takes over the wet foredeck job the son-in-law shirks; the boss's son lets the singer try the wheel, and she loves the heeling boat.

The gale strengthens and they run for a sheltered cove, the boat heeling hard in heavy gusts as the boss's son considers shortening sail.

The mast breaks and goes over; the son-in-law panics while the boss's son calmly organises everyone to chop away the wreckage and motor into the cove, where the women have made dinner, cooked by the singer.

The singer laughs that she can cook and wash up too; the pair do the dishes together, the boss's son has Torchy throw the unread plays overboard, and the couple are seen side by side over a chart.

Through dinner and next morning she monopolises the helpless boss's son with chatter, palm-reading and flowers, while the singer watches, amused; the daughter grows angry.

The boss's son greets them all warmly and announces his engagement; asked about the charter, he vaguely thinks someone was told to handle it, and the senior clerk staggers in battered, holding the signed charter.

The senior clerk spent the night on the waterfront, was knocked about, and closed the option two hours before it lapsed, but the boss's son barely notices and keeps telling everyone he is to be married.

The cousin and the boss's daughter plan a lavish wedding three weeks off, with a bishop, an organ and a special train; the boss's son protests.

He denounces solemn weddings as gloomy barbarism and insists on a cheerful one; the next day he tells Torchy the bride agrees and asks him to her apartment.

Costumed, everyone grows playful; with hidden cameras rolling and the band striking up, the party and the actors romp across the lawn in a merry procession.

Not a scene: the publisher's back-matter advertising other novels, split in with the last story of the volume.

Not a scene: more of the publisher's back-matter advertising other novels, split in with the last story of the volume.