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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of On the Stairs, by Henry B. Fuller
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: On the Stairs
+
+Author: Henry B. Fuller
+
+Release Date: May 26, 2007 [EBook #21613]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE STAIRS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+ON THE STAIRS
+
+by
+Henry B. Fuller
+
+Author of _Lines Long and Short_
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+1918
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY HENRY B. FULLER
+
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+_Published March 1918_
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+This volume may seem less a Novel than a Sketch of a Novel or a Study
+for a Novel. It might easily be amplified; but, like other recent work
+of mine, it was written in the conviction that story-telling, whatever
+form it take, can be done within limits narrower than those now
+generally employed.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+ON THE STAIRS
+
+PART I
+
+I
+
+
+In the year 1873--
+
+No, do not turn away from such an opening; I shall reach our own day
+within a paragraph or so.
+
+In the year 1873, then, Johnny McComas was perfectly willing to stand to
+one side while Raymond Prince, surrounded by several of the fellows,
+came down, in his own negligent and self-assured way, the main stairway
+of Grant's Private Academy. For Johnny was newer there; Johnny was
+younger in this world by a year or two, at an age when a year or two
+makes a difference; and Johnny had but lately left behind what might be
+described as a condition of servitude. So Johnny yielded the right of
+way. He lowered his little snub nose by a few degrees, took some of the
+gay smile out of his twinkling blue eyes, and waited with an upward
+glance of friendly yet deferential sobriety until Raymond should have
+passed.
+
+"How are you, Johnny?" asked Raymond carelessly.
+
+"I'm pretty well," replied Johnny, in all modesty.
+
+In the year 1916--
+
+Yes, I told you we should reach our own times presently.
+
+In the year 1916, then, Raymond Prince was standing to one side, whether
+willing or not, while John W. McComas, attended by several men who would
+make their cares his own, came down the big marble stairway of the
+Mid-Continent National Bank. Raymond, who had his cares too, would
+gladly have been included in the company (or, rather, have replaced it
+altogether); but he saw clearly that the time was not propitious.
+McComas looked out through this swarm of lesser people, half-saw Prince
+as in a mist, and gave him unsmilingly an abstracted half-bow.
+
+"How do you do?" he mumbled impersonally.
+
+"I'm pretty well," returned Prince, in a toneless voice. But he was far
+from that, whether in mind or estate.
+
+Between these two dates and these two incidents lies most of my story.
+Be quite sure that I shall tell it in my own fashion.
+
+
+II
+
+First, however, this: I do not intend to magnify the Academy and its
+stairway. The Academy did very well in its day, and it happened to be
+within easy distance of James Prince's residence. If its big green doors
+were flanked on one side by a grocery and on the other by a laundry, and
+if its stairway was worn untidily by other feet than those of Dr.
+Grant's boys, I shall simply point out that this was all in the day of
+small things and that Fastidiousness was still upon her way. Should this
+not satisfy you, I will state that, in the year following, the Academy
+moved into other quarters: it lodged itself in a near-by private
+residence whose owner, in real estate, sensed down-heeled Decadence
+stealing that way a few years before any of his neighbors felt it, and
+who made his shifts accordingly. If even this does not satisfy you, I
+might sketch the entrance and stairway, somewhere in Massachusetts,
+which are to know the footfalls of Lawrence D. McComas, aged ten,
+grandson of Johnny; but such a step would perhaps take us too far afield
+as well as slightly into the future. One does not pass a lad through
+_that_ gateway on the spur of the moment.
+
+Nor ought I to magnify, on the other hand, the marble stairway of the
+Mid-Continent. This was not one of the town's greater banks; and the
+stairway was at the disposal not only of the bank's clientèle, but at
+that of sixteen tiers of tenants. However, it represented some advanced
+architect's ideal of grandeur, and it served to make the bank's
+president seem haughty when in truth he was only preoccupied.
+
+As you may now surmise, this story, even at its highest, will not throw
+millions on the habituated and indifferent air; nor, at its most
+distended, will it push the pride of life too far. That has been done
+already in sufficing measure by many others. Let us ride here an even
+keel and keep well within rule and reason.
+
+I am simply to tell you how, as the years moved on, John McComas climbed
+the stairs of life from the bottom to the top--or so, at least, he was
+commonly considered to have done; and how, through the same years,
+Raymond Prince passed slowly and reluctantly along the same stairs from
+top to bottom--or so his critics usually regarded his course. Nor
+without some color of justice, I presume that they will pass each other
+somewhere near the middle of my volume.
+
+
+III
+
+In 1873 James Prince was living in a small, choice residential district
+near the Lake. Its choiceness was great, but was not duly guarded. The
+very smallness of the neighborhood--a triumphant record of early
+fortunes--put it upon a precarious basis: there was all too slight a
+margin against encroachments. And, besides, the discovery came to be
+made, some years later, that it was upon the wrong side of the river
+altogether. But it held up well in 1873; and it continued to do so
+through the eighties. Perhaps it was not until the middle or later
+nineties that the real exodus began. Some of the early magnates had
+died; some had evaporated financially; others had come to perceive,
+either for themselves or through their children, that the road to social
+consideration now ran another way. In due course a congeries of bulky
+and grandiose edifices, built lavishly in the best taste of their own
+day, remained to stare vacantly at the infrequent passer-by, or to
+tremble before the imminent prospect of sinking to unworthy uses: odd,
+old-time megatheriums stranded ineptly in their mortgage-mud. But
+through the seventies the neighborhood held up its head and people came
+from far to see it.
+
+James Prince lived in one of these houses; and, around the corner, old
+Jehiel Prince lingered on in another.
+
+James was, of course, Raymond's father. Jehiel was his grandfather.
+Raymond, when we take him up, was at the age of thirteen. And Johnny
+McComas, if you care to know, was close on twelve.
+
+Jehiel Prince was of remote New England origin, and had come West by way
+of York State. He had been born somewhere between Utica and Rochester.
+He put up his house on no basis of domestic sociability; it was designed
+as a sort of monument to his personal success. He had not left the East
+to be a failure, or to remain inconspicuous. His contractor--or his
+architect, if one had been employed--had imagined a heavy, square affair
+of dull-red brick, with brown-stone trimmings in heavy courses. Items: a
+high basement, an undecorated mansard in slate; a big, clumsy pair of
+doors, set in the middle of all, at the top of a heavily balustraded
+flight of brown-stone steps; one vast window on the right of the doors
+to light the "parlor," and another like it, on the left, to light the
+"library": a façade reared before any allegiance to "periods," and in a
+style best denominated local or indigenous. Jehiel was called a
+capitalist and had a supplementary office in the high front basement;
+and here he was fretting by himself, off and on, in 1873; and here he
+continued to fret by himself, off and on, until 1880, when he fretted
+himself from earth. He was an unhappy man, with no essential mastery of
+life. His wife existed somewhere upstairs. They seldom spoke--indeed
+seldom met--unless papers to shift the units of a perplexed estate were
+up for consideration. Sometimes her relatives stole into the house to
+see her and hoped, with fearfulness, not to meet her husband in some
+passageway. He himself had plenty of relatives, by blood as well as by
+marriage; too many of these were rascals, and they kept him busy. The
+town, in the seventies, was at the adventurous, formative stage; almost
+everybody was leaving the gravel walks of Probity to take a short cut
+across the fair lawns of Success, and the social landscape was a good
+deal cut up and disfigured.
+
+"Poor relations!"--such was Jehiel's brief, scornful rating of the less
+capable among these supernumeraries. A poor relation represented, to
+him, the lowest form of animal life.
+
+And when the chicane and intrigue of the more clever among them roused
+his indignation he would exclaim: "They're putting me through the
+smut-machine!"--an ignominious, exasperating treatment which he refused
+to undergo without loud protests. These protests often reduced his wife
+to trembling and to tears. At such times she might hide an elder
+sister--one on the pursuit of some slight dole--in a small back bedroom,
+far from sight and hearing.
+
+An ugly house, inhabited by unhappy people. Perhaps I should brighten
+things by bringing forward, just here, Elsie, Jehiel's beautiful
+granddaughter. But he had no granddaughter. We must let Elsie pass.
+
+Yet a fresh young shoot budding from a gnarled old trunk would afford a
+piquant contrast--has done so hundreds of times. Jehiel Prince
+undoubtedly _was_ gnarled and old and tough; a charming granddaughter to
+cajole or wheedle him in the library, or to relax his indignant tension
+over young men during their summer attendance on swing or hammock, would
+have her uses. Yet a swing or a hammock would suggest, rather than the
+bleak stateliness of Jehiel's urban environment, some fair, remote
+domain with lawns and gardens; and Jehiel was far from possessing--or
+from wanting to possess--a country-house. Elsie may be revived, if
+necessary; but I can promise nothing. I rather think you have heard the
+last of her.
+
+James lived a few hundred yards from his father; his house bulked to
+much the same effect. It was another symmetrical, indigenous box--in
+stone, however, and not in brick. It had its mortgage. If this mortgage
+was ever paid up, another came later--a mortgage which passed through
+various renewals and which, as values were falling, was always renewed
+for a lesser amount and was always demanding ready money to meet the
+difference. In later years Raymond, with this formidable weight still
+pressing upon him, received finally an offer of relief and liberation;
+some prosperous upstart, with plans of his own, said he would chance the
+property, mortgage and all, if paid a substantial bonus for doing so.
+
+The premises included a stable. I mention the stable on account of
+Johnny McComas. He lived in it. Downstairs, the landau and the two
+horses, and another horse, and a buggy and phaeton, and sometimes a cow;
+upstairs, Johnny and his father and mother. Johnny could look out
+through a crumpled dimity curtain across the back yard and could see his
+father freezing ice-cream on a Sunday forenoon on the back kitchen
+porch; and he could also look into one of Raymond's windows on the floor
+above.
+
+Every so often he would beg:--
+
+"Oh, father, let me do it,--please!"
+
+Then he would lose the double prospect and get, instead, a plate of
+vanilla with a tin spoon in it.
+
+Raymond, who had no mastering passion for games, sat a good deal in his
+room, sometimes at one of the side windows; occasionally at the back
+one, in which case Johnny was quite welcome to look. Raymond had more
+desks than one, and books everywhere on the walls between them. He had a
+strong bent toward study, and was even beginning to dip into literary
+composition. He studied when he might better have been at play, and he
+kept up his diary under a student lamp into all hours of the night. He
+had been reading lately about Paris, and he was piecing out the
+elementary instruction of the Academy by getting together a collection
+of French grammars and dictionaries. He had about decided that sometime
+he would go to live on that island in the Seine near Notre Dame.
+
+His father told him he was working too hard and too late--that it would
+hurt his health and probably injure his eyes. His mother made no comment
+and gave no advice. She was an invalid and thus had absorbing interests
+of her own. Raymond kept on reading and writing.
+
+Perhaps I should begin to sketch, just about here, his awakening regard
+for some Gertrude or Adele, and his young rivalry with Johnny McComas
+for her favor; telling how Johnny won over Raymond the privilege of
+carrying her books to school, and how, in the end, he won Gertrude or
+Adele herself from Raymond, and married her. Fiddlesticks! Please put
+all such conventional procedures out of your head, and take what I am
+prepared to give you. The school was a boys' school. There was no
+Gertrude or Adele--as yet--any more than there was an Elsie. Raymond
+kept to his books and indulged in no juvenile philanderings. Forget all
+such foolish stereotypings of fancy.
+
+As for the romance and the rivalry: when that came, it came with a vast
+difference.
+
+
+IV
+
+Jehiel Prince was a capitalist. So was James: a capitalist, and the son
+of a capitalist. They had some interests in common, and others apart.
+There was a bank, and there were several large downtown business-blocks
+whose tenants required a lot of bookkeeping, and there was a horse-car
+line. There was a bus-line, too, between the railroad depots and the
+hotels. James destined Raymond for the bank. He would hardly go to
+college, but at seventeen or so would begin on the collection-register
+or some such matter; later he might come to be a receiving-teller;
+pretty soon he might rise to an apprehension of banking as a science
+and have a line as an official in the _Bankers' Gazette_. Beyond that he
+might go as far as he was able. James thought that, thus favored in
+early years, the boy might go far.
+
+But Raymond had just taken on Rome, and was finding it even more
+interesting than Paris. The Academy's professor of ancient history began
+to regard him as a prodigy. Then, somehow or other, Raymond got hold of
+Gregorovius, with his "City of Rome in the Middle Ages"--though his
+teacher did not know of this, and would have been sure to consider it an
+undesirable deviation from the straight and necessary path; and
+thenceforth the dozens of ordinary boys about him counted, I feel sure,
+for less than ever.
+
+Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put myself into the story
+as one of the characters. Then the many I's will no longer refer to the
+author named on the title-page, but will represent the direct
+participation--direct, even though inconspicuous--of a person whose
+name, status, and general nature will be made manifest, incidentally
+and gradually, as we proceed. You object that though one's status and
+general nature may be revealed "gradually," such can scarcely be the
+case as regards one's name? But if I tell you that my Christian name is,
+let us say, Oliver, and then intimate in some succeeding section that my
+surname is Ormsby, and then do not disclose my middle initial--which may
+be W--until the middle of the book (in some documentary connection,
+perhaps), shall I not be doing the thing "gradually"?
+
+Oliver W. Ormsby. H'm! I'm not so sure that I like it. Well, my name may
+turn out, after all, to be something quite different. And possibly I may
+be found to be without any middle initial whatever.
+
+But to return to the method itself. You will find it pursued in many
+good novels and in many bad ones; with admirable discretion--to make an
+instance--in "The Way of All Flesh"; and the procedure may be humbly
+copied here. It will involve, of course, a rather close attendance on
+both Raymond and Johnny through a long term of years; but perhaps the
+difficulties involved--or, rather, the awkwardnesses--can be got round
+in one way or another.
+
+At the Academy we like Raymond well enough, on the whole--
+
+You see at once how the method applies: I make myself an attendant
+there, and I place my age midway between the ages of the other two.
+
+As I say, we liked Raymond well enough, yet did not quite feel that he
+coalesced. "Coalesced" was hardly the word we used--such verbal
+grandeurs were reserved for our "compositions"; but you know what I
+mean. Another point to be made clear without delay is this: that when
+Johnny appeared at the Academy, he had lately left behind him the
+previous condition of servitude involved in a lodgment above the landau,
+the phaeton, and sometimes the cow. His father and mother, as I saw them
+and remember them, appeared to be rather nice people. Perhaps they had
+lately come from some small country town and had not been able, at
+first, to realize themselves and their abilities to the best advantage
+in the city. Assuredly his father knew how to drive horses and to care
+for them; and he had an intuitive knack for safeguarding his
+self-respect. And Johnny's mother was perfectly competent to cook and to
+keep house--even above a stable--most neatly. If Johnny's curtain was
+rumpled, that was Johnny's own incorrigible fault. The window-sill was a
+wide one, and Johnny, I found, used it as a catch-all. He kept there a
+few boxes of "bugs," as we called his pinned-down specimens, and an
+album of postage-stamps that was always in a state of metamorphosis. He
+had some loose stamps too, and sometimes, late in the afternoon or on
+Saturdays, we "traded." Johnny's mother was likely to caution us about
+her freshly scrubbed floors, and sometimes gave me a cooky on my
+leaving. I never heard of Raymond's having been there.
+
+But presently the trading stopped, and the "bugs," however firmly pinned
+down, took their flight. Johnny's father and mother "moved"--that was
+the brief, unadorned, sufficing formula. It was all accepted as
+inevitable; hardly for a boy a little past twelve, like myself, to
+question the movements of Olympian elders; nor even, in fact, to feel an
+abiding interest in them when I had seen them but three or four times in
+all. I never speculated--never asked where they had come from; never
+considered the nature of their tenure (not wondering how much Johnny's
+father may have been paid for driving the two bays and washing the
+parlor and bedroom windows and milking the cow, when there was one, and
+not figuring the reduction in wages due to the renting value of the
+three or four small rooms they occupied); nor did I much concern myself
+as to whither they might have gone. Probably opportunity had opened up a
+more promising path. However, the path did not lead far; for Johnny, a
+month or two later, made his first appearance at the Academy, on the
+opening of the fall term. During the preceding year he had been going to
+a public school "across the tracks" and had played with a boisterous
+crowd in a big cindered yard.
+
+Therefore, when Raymond, surrounded by half a dozen other boys, took
+occasion, on the stairs, to say:--
+
+"How are you, Johnny?"--
+
+And Johnny, with his back to the wall of the landing, replied:--
+
+"I'm pretty well,"--
+
+Johnny may have meant that, despite the novelty and the strangeness of
+his situation, he was very well, indeed; feeling, doubtless, that he was
+finally where he had a right to be and that his alert face was turned
+the proper way.
+
+The boys about Raymond were asking him to take part in a football game.
+It was not that Raymond was especially popular; but he could run. In
+that simple day football was football--principally a matter of running
+and of straightforward kicking; and Raymond could do both better than
+any other boy in the school. He could also outjump any of us--when he
+would take the trouble to try. In fact, his physical faculties were in
+his legs; his arms were nowhere. He was never able to throw either far
+or straight. Some of his early attempts at throwing were met with
+shouts of ridicule, and he never tried the thing further. If he fell
+upon the ill luck of finding a ball in his hands, he would toss it to
+somebody else with an air of facetious negligence. To stand, as Johnny
+McComas could stand, and throw a ball straight up for seventy-five feet
+and then catch it without stirring a foot from the spot where he was
+planted, would have been an utter impossibility for him. In fact,
+Raymond simply cultivated his obviously natural gifts; he never exerted
+himself systematically to make good any of his deficiencies. He was so
+as a boy; and he remained so always.
+
+In those early days we had no special playgrounds. We commonly used the
+streets. There was little traffic. Pedestrians took their chances on the
+sidewalks with leapfrog and the like, and we took ours, in turn, in the
+wide roadway with "pom-pom-peel-away" and similar games. Football,
+however, would take us to a vacant corner lot, some two streets away.
+Some absentee owner in the East was doubtless paying taxes on it with
+hopes of finally recouping himself through the unearned increment.
+Meanwhile it ran somewhat to rubbish and tin cans, to bare spots from
+which adjoining homemakers had removed irregular squares of turf, and to
+holes in the dry, brown earth where potatoes had been baked with a
+minimum of success and a maximum of wood ashes and acrid smoke. It was
+on the way to this frequented tract that Raymond carelessly let fall a
+word about Johnny McComas. Perhaps he need not have said that Johnny had
+lately been living above his father's stable--but he spoke without
+special animus. A few of the boys thought Johnny's intrusion odd, even
+cheeky; but most of them, employing the social assimilability of
+youth,--especially that of youth in the Middle West,--laid little stress
+upon it. Johnny made his place, in due time and on his own merits. Or
+shall I say, rather, by his own powers?
+
+
+V
+
+You are not to suppose that while I was free to visit Johnny in the
+stable, I was not free to visit Raymond in the house. Though my people
+lived rather modestly on a side street, the interior of the Prince
+residence was not unknown to me. On one occasion Raymond took me up to
+his room so that I might hear some of his writings. He had been to
+Milwaukee or to Indianapolis, and had found himself moved to set down an
+account of his three days away from home. He led me through several big
+rooms downstairs before we got to his own particular quarters above. The
+furnishing of these rooms impressed me at the time; but I know, now,
+that they were heavy and clumsy when they were meant to be rich and
+massive, and were meretricious when they were meant to be elegant. It
+was all of the Second Empire, qualified by an erratic, exaggerated touch
+that was natively American. I am afraid I found it rather superb and was
+made uncomfortable--was even intimidated by it; all the more so that
+Raymond took it completely for granted. One room contained a big
+orchestrion with many pipes in tiers, like an organ's. On one occasion I
+heard it play the overture to "William Tell," and it managed the
+"Storm" very handily. There was a large, three-cornered piano in the
+same room--one of the sort I never could feel at home with; and this
+instrument, more than the other, I suppose, gave Raymond his futile and
+disadvantageous start toward music. Travel; art; anything but the bank.
+
+I have no idea at what time of day he introduced me into the house, but
+it was an hour at which the men, as well as the women, were at home. In
+one part or another of the hall I met his mother. She was dark and lean;
+without being tall, she looked gaunt. She seemed occupied with herself,
+as she moved out of one shadow into another, and she gave scant
+attention to a casual boy. Raymond was really no more hospitable than
+any young and growing organism must be; but perhaps she was thankful
+that it was only one boy, instead of three or four.
+
+In another room, somewhere on the first floor, I had a glimpse of his
+father. I remember him as a sedate man who did not insist. If he set a
+boy right, it was done but verbally; the boy was left to see the
+justness of the point and to act on it for himself. I gathered, later,
+that James Prince had done little, unaided, for himself; whatever he had
+accomplished had been in conjunction with other men--with his father,
+particularly; and when his father died, a few years later, he was the
+chief heir--and he never added much to what he had received. To him fell
+the property--and its worries. The worries, I surmise, were the greater
+part of it all. Everything has to be paid for, and James Prince's easily
+gained success was paid for, through the ensuing years, with
+considerable anxieties and perturbations.
+
+It was his father, I presume, who was with him as I passed the library
+door: a bent, gray man, with a square head and a yellow face. A third
+man was between them; a tall, dry, cold fellow with iron-gray beard and
+no mustache--a face in the old New England tradition. This man was, of
+course, their lawyer, and I judge that he gave them little comfort. I
+felt him as chill and slow, as enjoying the tying and untying of
+legalities with a stiff, clammy hand, and as unlikely to be hurried on
+account of any temperament possessed by himself or manifested by his
+clients. Fire, in a wide sweep, had overtaken the town a year or two
+before--a community owned by the Eastern seaboard and mortgaged to its
+eyebrows; and the Princes, as I learned years later, had been building
+extensively on borrowed capital just before the fire-doom came. Probably
+too great a part of the funds employed came from their own bank.
+
+Raymond, once the second floor was reached, showed me his desks and
+bookcases; also a new sort of pen which he had thought to be able to
+use, but which he had cast aside. And he offered to read me his account
+of the three days in Milwaukee, or wherever.
+
+"If you would like to hear...?" he said, with a sort of bashful
+determination.
+
+"Just as you please," I replied, patient then, as ever after, in the
+face of the arts.
+
+Nothing much seemed to have happened--nothing that I, at least, should
+have taken the trouble to set down; but a good part of his fifteen
+pages, as he read them, seemed interesting and even important. I suppose
+this came from the way he did it. As early as thirteen he had the
+knack; then, and always after, he enjoyed writing for its own sake. I
+feel sure that his father did not quite approve this taste. His
+grandfather, who had had a lesser education and felt an exaggerated
+respect for learning, may have had more patience. He talked for years
+about endowing some college, but never did it; when the time finally
+came, he was far too deep in his financial worries.
+
+James Prince, as I have noted, occasionally mentioned to Raymond his
+conviction that he was wasting his time with all this scribbling, and
+that so much work by artificial light was imperiling his eyesight.
+
+"What good is it all going to do you?" I once heard him ask. His tone
+was resigned, as if he had put the question several times before. "I
+don't think I'd write quite so much, if I were you."
+
+Raymond looked at him in silence. "Not write?" he seemed to say. "You
+might as well ask me not to breathe."
+
+"At least do it by daylight," his father suggested, or
+counseled,--scarcely urged. "You won't have any eyes at all by the time
+you're thirty."
+
+But Raymond liked his double student-lamp with green shades. He liked
+the quiet and retirement of late hours. I believe he liked even the
+smell and smear of the oil.
+
+His father spoke, as I have reported; but he never took away the pen or
+put the light out. The boy seemingly had too strong a "slant": a
+misfortune--or, at least, a disadvantage--which a concerned parent must
+somehow endure. But he did take a more decided tack later on: he never
+said a word about Raymond's going to college, and Raymond, as a fact,
+never went. He fed his own intellectual furnace, and fed it in his own
+way. He learned an immense number of useless and unrelated things. In
+time they came to cumber him. Perhaps college would have been better,
+after all.
+
+I never knew Raymond to show any affection for either of his parents;
+and he had no brothers and sisters. His father was an essentially kind,
+just man, and might have welcomed an occasional little manifestation of
+feeling. One day he told Raymond he had no heart. That was as far as
+emotion and the expression of emotion could carry him. Raymond's mother
+might have been kindly too, if she had not had herself. But a new
+doctor, a new remedy, a new draught from a new quarter--and her boy was
+instantly nowhere. Raymond's own position seemed to be that life in
+families was the ordained thing and was to be accepted. Well, this was
+the family ordained for him, and he would put up with it as best he
+might. But I kept on developing my own impression of him; and I see now
+just what that impression was going to be. Raymond, almost from the
+start, felt himself as an independent, detached, isolated individual,
+and he must have his little zone of quiet round him. Why in the world he
+should ever have married...!
+
+I never knew him to show gratitude for anything given him by his
+parents. On the other hand, I never heard him ask them for anything. He
+possessed none of the little ingenuities by which boys sometimes secure
+a bit of pocket-money. If he wanted anything, he went without it until
+it was offered. Frankly, he seldom had to wait long.
+
+Not that what came was always the right thing. He showed me his
+fountain-pen--one of the early half-failures--with some disdain. He
+always carried a number of things in his pocket, but never the pen. I
+myself tried it one day, and it went well enough; I should have been
+glad to have it for my own. But steel pens sufficed him; save once, when
+I saw him, in a high mood, experimenting fantastically with a quill one.
+
+He cared no more about his clothes than any of the rest of us. He never
+laid any real stress on them at any time of life. He developed early a
+notion of the sufficiency of interior furnishings; mere external
+upholstery never quite secured his interest. I heard his father once or
+twice complain of his looking careless and shabby. He waited with
+equanimity until his father could take him to the clothier's. He asked
+but one thing; that there should be no indulgence in sartorial
+novelties at his expense. And I never met a sedater taste in neckties.
+
+Three or four were hanging over the gas-jet, close to the window; they
+were all dark blues or grays, and most of them frayed. He expected a new
+one about Christmas; no hurry.
+
+From that window, across the back yard, we saw Johnny McComas, in a
+bright new red tie, busy at his own window. I waved my hand, and he
+waved back. Raymond looked at him, but made no special sign. Johnny was
+packing up his specimens and his postage-stamps, preparatory to the
+family hegira, though neither of us knew.
+
+
+VI
+
+Raymond, who might have asked for almost anything, asked for nothing.
+Johnny, who was in position to ask for next to nothing, asked for almost
+everything. He was constantly teasing his parents, so far as my
+observation went; and his teasing was a form of criticism. "You are not
+doing the right thing by me"--such might have seemed his plaint. He was
+beginning to spread, to reach out: acquisitiveness and assimilativeness
+were to be his two watchwords. He hankered after the externalities; he
+wanted "things." If it was only a new stamp-album, he wanted it hard,
+and he said so. I shall not go so far as to say that he hectored his
+parents into sending him to our school. They were probably feeling, on
+their own account, that they had come to town for better things than
+they had been getting; and likely enough they met his demands halfway.
+There was usually a certain element of cheeriness in his nagging; but
+the cheeriness was quite secondary to the insistence.
+
+"Oh, come, mother!" or, "Oh, father, now!" was commonly Johnny's opening
+formula, employed with a smile, wheedling or protesting, as the occasion
+seemed to require.
+
+And, "Oh, well...!" was commonly the opening formula for the
+response--meaning, in completed form, "Well, if we must, we must."
+
+However, his parents were probably ready to meet with an open mind the
+scorings of their young, sole critic, thinking that his urgency might
+advance themselves no less than him. Well, in the autumn Johnny turned
+up at the Academy with an equipment that included everything approved
+and needed; and he was not long in letting us know that his father was
+manager in the supply-yard of a large firm of contractors and builders.
+His father had spent his earlier married years, it transpired, about the
+grounds of a small-town "depot," and knew a good deal in regard to
+lumber and cement.
+
+To most of us fathers were fathers and businesses were
+businesses--things to be accepted without comment or criticism. Our own
+youthfulness, and the social tone of the day and region, discouraged
+either. If I thought anything about it, I must have thought, as I think
+still, that it was a manly and satisfying matter to come to grips with
+the serviceable actualities of the building trades. Construction, in its
+various phases, still seems to me a more useful and more tonic concern
+than brokerage, for example, and similar forms of office life.
+
+Johnny soon suggested that I go with him, some Saturday afternoon, to
+the "yard." I asked Raymond to join us. Raymond had just come on Gothic
+architecture and was studying its historical phases. He was picking up
+points about the English cathedrals and was making drawings to
+illustrate the development of buttresses and of window tracery. The yard
+was only a mile and a half away and the three of us frolicked loosely
+along the streets until we got there. Johnny's father was going about
+the place in an admirable pair of new blue overalls, and carried a
+thick, blunt pencil behind one ear. He showed an independent, breezy
+manner that had not been very marked before. He was loud and clear and
+authoritative, and kept a dozen or more stout fellows pretty busy. Once
+an elderly man in a high silk hat passed through the yard on his way to
+its little office. He stopped, and he and Johnny's father had some talk
+together. "Yes, sir!" said Johnny's father, with considerable emphasis
+and momentum. I enjoyed his "Yes, sir!" It was pleasant to find him so
+hearty and so well-mannered. He seemed to have escaped from something
+and to be glad of it. The man in the high hat hardly tried to stand up
+against him. As he turned away he smiled in a curious fashion; and I
+thought I heard him say to himself, as he moved back toward the door of
+the shed that had the sign "Office" on it: "I wonder whether I'm going
+to run him, or whether he's going to run me?"
+
+Johnny was all eyes for a tall stack of lathing in bundles and for a
+pile of sacks filled with hair from cows' hides, which last was to go
+into plaster. Raymond looked at these objects of interest--and at
+several others--with some degree of abstractedness. The English
+cathedrals, as I was told later, had not been plastered. Raymond had
+already developed some faculty for entertaining a concept freed from
+clogging and qualifying detail; and this faculty grew as he grew. He
+liked his ideal _net_; facts, practical facts, never had much charm for
+him. I remember his once saying, when about twenty-three, that he should
+have liked to be an architect, but that plumbing and speaking-tubes had
+turned him away. If he could have drawn façades and stopped there, I
+think he might have been quite happy and successful in the profession.
+
+Johnny pulled a lath for each of us out of one of the bundles, and we
+used them in our tour of the yard as alpenstocks. We found a glacier in
+the shape of a mortar bed and were using the laths to sound its depths,
+when Johnny's father appeared from round the corner of a lumber pile. He
+clapped his hands with a loud report.
+
+"Here! that won't do!" he said; and none of us thought it remotely
+possible to withstand him. "Enough for one morning," he added, and he
+waved both arms with a broad scoop to motion us toward the street gate.
+
+"Oh, father, now!" began Johnny (with no smile at all), conscious of his
+position as host.
+
+"No more, to-day," said his father. "School six days a week would be
+about my idea."
+
+Raymond said nothing, but drew up his mouth to one side and himself led
+us toward the street.
+
+
+VII
+
+I would not seem to stress either the saliency or the significance of
+these incidents. I simply put them down, after many years, just as they
+return to my memory. Memory is sporadic; memory is capricious; memory is
+inconsequent, sometimes forgetting the large thing to record the little.
+And memory may again prove itself all these, and more, if I attempt to
+rescue from the past a children's party.
+
+It was my young sister who "gave" it, as our expression was; parents in
+the background, providing the funds and engineering the mechanism, were
+not allowed greatly to count. The party was given for my sister's
+visitor, a little girl from some small interior town whose name (whether
+child's or town's) I have long since forgotten. Raymond was invited, of
+course;--"though he isn't very nice to us," as my sister ruefully
+observed; and some prompting toward fair play (as I vaguely termed it to
+myself) made me suggest Johnny McComas. He came.
+
+There must have been some twenty-five of us--all that our small house
+would hold. There were more games than dances; and the games were
+largely "kissing" games: "post-office," "clap-in, clap-out," "drop the
+handkerchief," and such-like innocent infantilities. Some of us thought
+ourselves too old for this sort of thing, and would willingly have left
+it to the younger children; but the eager lady from next door, who was
+"helping," insisted that we all take part. This is the place for the
+Gertrudes and the Adeles, and they were there in good measure, be-bowed
+and be-sashed and fluttering about (or romping about) flushed and happy.
+And this would be pre-eminently the place for Elsie, Jehiel's
+granddaughter and Raymond's cousin. Elsie would naturally be, in the
+general scheme, my childhood sweetheart; later, my fiancée; and
+ultimately my wife. Such a relationship would help me, of course, to
+keep tab more easily on Raymond during the long course of his life. For
+instance, at this very party I see her doing a polka with Johnny
+McComas, while Raymond (who had been sent to dancing-school, but had
+steadfastly refused to "learn") views Johnny with a mixture of envy and
+contempt. A year or two later, I see Elsie seated in the twilight at the
+head of her grandfather's grandiose front steps, surrounded by boys of
+seventeen or eighteen, while Raymond, sent on some errand to his
+grandfather's house, picks his way through the crowd to say to himself,
+censoriously, in the vestibule: "Well, if I can't talk any better at
+that age than they do...!" Yes, Elsie would undeniably have been an
+aid; but she never existed, and we must dispense with her for once and
+for all.
+
+Raymond could always make himself difficult, and he usually did so at
+parties. To be difficult was to be choice, and to be choice was to be
+desirable. Therefore he got more of the kisses than he might have got
+otherwise--many more, in fact, than he cared for. But on this occasion a
+good part of his talent for making himself difficult was reserved until
+refreshment time. Most of the boys and girls had paired instinctively to
+make a prompt raid on the dining-room table, with Johnny McComas
+unabashedly to the fore; but Raymond lingered behind. My mother
+presently found him moping alone in the parlor, where he was looking
+with an over-emphatic care at the pictures.
+
+"Why, Raymond dear! Why aren't you out with the others? Don't you want
+anything to eat?"
+
+No; Raymond didn't want anything.
+
+"But you do--of course you do. Come."
+
+Then Raymond, thus urged and escorted,--and, above all,
+individualized,--allowed himself to be led out to the refreshments; and,
+to do him justice, he ate as much and as happily as any one else. Johnny
+McComas, with his mouth full, and with Gertrudes and Adeles all around
+him, welcomed him with the high sign of jovial _camaraderie_.
+
+Yes, Johnny took his full share of the ice-cream and macaroons; he got
+his full quota of letters from the "post-office"; the handkerchief was
+dropped behind him every third or fourth time, and he always caught the
+attentive little girl who was whisking away--if he wanted to. He even
+took a manful part in the dancing.
+
+"What a good schottische!" exclaimed one of the Adeles, as the
+industrious lady from next door, after a final bang, withdrew her hands
+from the keyboard. "And how well you dance!"
+
+"Gee!" exclaimed Johnny, with his most open-faced smile; "is that what
+you call it--a schottische? I never tried it before in my life!"
+
+"Learn by doing"--such might have been the motto of the town in those
+early, untutored days. And Johnny McComas emphatically made this motto
+his own.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+I
+
+
+Raymond went into the bank; not in due course, but rather more than a
+year later. After seeing some of his more advanced schoolfellows depart
+for Eastern colleges, after indulging a year of desultory study at home,
+and after passing a summer and autumn among the Wisconsin lakes, he was
+formally claimed by Finance. There was no Franciscan ardor to clasp her
+close, as others have clasped Poverty and Obedience. He began his
+business career, as men have been recommended to begin their matrimonial
+career, with a slight aversion. However, his aversion never brought him
+any future good.
+
+His year at home, so far as I could make out, was taken up largely with
+æsthetics and music. He read the "Seven Lamps of Architecture" and they
+lighted him along a road that led far, far from the constructional
+practicalities of the yard where we had spent a Saturday forenoon, some
+five years before. He had begun to collect books on the brickwork of
+Piacenza and Cremona, and these too led him farther along the general
+path of æstheticism. During our years at the Academy the town, after an
+unprecedentedly thorough sweep by fire, had been rebuilding itself; and
+on more than one Saturday forenoon of that period we had tramped
+together through the devastated district, rejoicing in the restorative
+activities on every hand and honestly admiring the fantasies and
+ingenuities of the "architects" of the day. But Raymond had now emerged
+from that innocent stage; summoning forth from some interior reservoir
+of taste an inspirational code of his own, he condemned these crudities
+and aberrations as severely as they probably deserved, and cultivated a
+confident belief that somewhere or other he was to find things which
+should square better with his likings and should respond more kindly to
+his mounting sensibilities.
+
+"Not going to cut us?" I once asked. "Just as we're picking up, too?"
+
+But Raymond looked abstractedly into the distance and undertook no
+definite reply. Possibly he had responded to Ruskin; more probably to
+some divine young sense of truth and fitness such as forms the natural
+endowment, by no means uncommon, of right-minded youth. Or it may be
+that he had simply reached the "critical" age, when Idealism calls the
+Daily Practicalities to its bar and delivers its harsh, imperious
+judgments; when it puts the world, if but for a few brief months, "where
+it belongs." His natural tendency toward generalization helped him
+here--helped, perhaps, too much. He passed judgment not only on his
+parents, whom he had been finding very unsatisfactory, and on most of
+his associates (myself, for example, whenever I happened to speak an
+appreciative word for his essentially admirable father), but on the
+community as such. A filmy visitant from Elsewhere had grazed his
+forehead and whispered in his ear that the town allotted to him by
+destiny was crude, alike in its deficiencies and in its affirmations,
+and that complete satisfaction for him lay altogether in another and
+riper quarter.
+
+Perhaps it was some such discontent as this that led him in the
+direction of musical composition--or toward attempts at it. He had no
+adequate preparation for it, nor, so far as I could perceive, any
+justificatory call. He had once taken a few terms on the piano; and he
+had on his shelves a few elementary works on harmony; and he had in his
+fingertips a certain limited knack for improvisation; and he had once
+sketched out, rather haltingly, a few simple songs. Yet, all the same,
+another reservoir, one of uncertain depth and capacity, was opening up
+for him at an age when opening-up was the continuing and dominating
+feature of one's days--a muse was stirring the vibrant air about him;
+and I gathered, after two or three certain visits to his house, that he
+had embarked on some composition or other of an ambitious and
+comprehensive nature: a cantata, possibly, or even some higher flight.
+As he had never domesticated musical theory and musical notation in his
+brain, most of his composing had to be carried on at the keyboard
+itself. The big piano in the big open drawing-room resounded with his
+strumming experiments in melody and harmony--sounds intelligible, often
+enough, to no ears but his own, and not always agreeable to them. I am
+sure he tried his parents' patience cruelly. His reiterated phrases and
+harmonizings were audible throughout a good part of the house. They did
+nothing toward relieving his mother's headaches, nothing toward raising
+his father's hopes that, pretty soon, he would come to grips with the
+elements of Loans and Discounts. Even the servants, setting the table,
+now and again closed the dining-room door.
+
+"Oh, Raymond, Raymond; _not_ to-day!" his mother would sometimes plead.
+
+I presume that, during this period, the diary was still going on; and no
+one with such a gift for writing will stop short at a diary. In fact,
+Raymond tried his hand at a few short stories--still another muse was
+fluttering about his temples. Most of these stories came back; but a few
+of them got printed obscurely in mangled form, and the failure of the
+venturesome periodicals sometimes deprived him of the honorarium (as
+pay was then pompously called) which would have given the last
+convincing touch to his claims on authorship. He spoke of these stories
+freely enough to me, but disclaimed all attempts at poetry: short of
+that field, I believe, he really did stay his hand.
+
+Well, perhaps too many good fairies--good only to the pitch of
+velleity--buzzed and brushed, like muses, or pseudo-muses, about his
+brows. All this unsettled him--and sometimes annoyed his daily
+associates. But how, without these instinctive young passes at Art,
+could the unceasing, glamorous and needful rebirth of the world get
+itself accomplished?
+
+
+II
+
+As for Johnny McComas, he found one year of our Academy enough. It was
+the getting in, not the staying in, that provoked his young powers. Our
+school, moreover, was explicitly classical in a day when the old
+classical ideal still ruled respected everywhere; and Johnny, much as he
+liked being with us and of us, could not see the world in terms of
+Latin paradigms. He wanted to be "doing something"; he wanted to be "in
+business." During the summer following his year at Dr. Grant's I heard
+of him as somebody's office-boy somewhere downtown, and then quite lost
+sight of him for the five years that succeeded.
+
+It occurred to me that Johnny must be doing just the right thing for
+himself; he would make the sort of office-boy that "business men" would
+contend for: easy to imagine the manoeuvres, even the feuds, that
+would enliven business blocks in the downtown district for the
+possession of Johnny's confident smile and dashing, forthright way. I
+learned, in due season, that Johnny had cast in his lot with a
+real-estate operator, and had been cherished, through periods harried by
+competition, as a pearl of price.
+
+The city was emphatically still in the "real-estate" stage. Anybody
+arriving without profession or training straightway began to sell lots.
+Nothing lay more openly abundant than land; the town had but to
+propagate itself automatically over the wide prairies. The wild flowers
+waved only to welcome the surveyor's gang; and new home-seekers--in the
+jargon of the trade--were ever hurrying to rasp themselves upon the
+ragged edges of the outskirts.
+
+One Sunday morning in May, Raymond and I determined on an excursion to
+the country--or, at all events, to some of the remoter suburbs. The bank
+would not claim his thoughts for twenty-four hours, nor the law-school
+mine. We left the train at a promising point and prepared to scuffle
+over a half-mile splotched with vervain and yarrow, yet to bloom, toward
+a long, thin range of trees that seemed to mark the course of some small
+stream. But between us and that possible stream there soon developed
+much besides the sprinkling of prairie flowers. We began to notice
+rough-ploughed strips of land that seemed to mean streets for some new
+subdivision; piles of lumber, here and there, which should serve to
+realize the ideals of the "home-seekers"; and presently a gay,
+improvised little shack with a disproportionate sign to blazon the
+hopes and ambitions of a well-known firm back in town. And in the
+doorway of the shack stood Johnny McComas.
+
+He was as ruddy as ever, and his blue eyes were a bit sharper. He was
+slightly heavier than either of us, but no taller. He knew us as quickly
+as we knew him. For some reason he did not seem particularly glad to see
+us. He made the reason clear at once.
+
+"They had me out here last Sunday," he said, looking about his chaotic
+domain disparagingly, "and they say they may have to have me out here
+next Sunday--somebody's sick or missing. But they won't," he continued
+darkly. It was a threat, we felt--a threat that would make some
+presumptuous superior cower and conform. "I really belong at our branch
+in Dellwood Park, where there _is_ something; not out here, beyond the
+last of everything." And he said more to indicate that his energies and
+abilities were temporarily going to waste.
+
+But having put himself right in his own eyes and in ours, he began to
+give rein to his fundamental good nature. Emerging from the cloud that
+was just now darkening his merits and his future, he asked, interestedly
+enough, what we ourselves were doing.
+
+I had to confess that I was still a student. Raymond mentioned briefly
+and reluctantly the bank. It was nothing to him that he, no less than
+Johnny, was now a man on a salary.
+
+"Bank, eh?" said Johnny. "That's good. We're thinking of starting a bank
+next year at our Dellwood branch. It's far enough in, and it's far
+enough out. Plenty of good little businesses all around there. And I'm
+going to make them let me have a hand in managing it."
+
+This warm ray of hope from the immediate future quite illumined Johnny.
+He told us genially about the prospects of the venture in the midst of
+which he was encamped, and ended by feigning us as a young bridal couple
+that had come out to look for a "home."
+
+"There may be one or two along pretty soon, if the day holds fair; so I
+might as well keep myself in practice." Then he jocularly let himself
+loose on transportation, and part payments down, and street
+improvements "in," and healthful country air for young children. He was
+very fluent and somewhat cynical, and turned the seamy side of his trade
+a little too clearly to view.
+
+He explained how the spring had been exceptionally wet in that
+region,--"which, after all, _is_ low," he acknowledged,--and how his
+firm, by digging a few trenches in well-considered directions, had
+drained all its standing water to adjoining acres still lower, the
+property of a prospective rival. Recalling this smart trick made Johnny
+think better of the people who would maroon him for a succession of
+Sundays, and he became more genially communicative still.
+
+"That gray streak off to the west--if you can see it--is our water
+drying up. Better be drying there than here. You can put a solid foot on
+every yard of our ground to-day. Come along with me and I'll show you
+your cottage--_domus, a, um_. Not quite right? Well, no great matter."
+
+He pointed toward a yellow pile of two-by-fours, siding, and shingles.
+"Be sure you make your last payment before you find yourselves warped
+out of shape."
+
+We followed. Johnny seemed much more expert and worldly-wise than either
+of us. We held our innocent excursion in abeyance and bowed with a
+certain embarrassed awe to Johnny's demonstration of his aptitude for
+taking the world as it was and to his light-handed, care-free way of
+handling so serious a matter, to most men, as the founding of a home. As
+we continued our jaunt, I began to feel that I now liked Johnny a little
+less than I could have wished.
+
+
+III
+
+At about this time Raymond and I found ourselves members of a little
+circle that expressed itself chiefly through choral music. It was almost
+a neighborhood circle, and almost a self-made circle--it gradually
+evolved itself, with no special guidance or intention, until, finally,
+there it was. I, at that period, may have felt that it would verge on
+the presumptuous to pick and choose--to attempt consciously the
+fabrication of a social environment--and so I adopted with docility the
+one which presented itself. Raymond, on the other hand, may have felt
+that even the best which was available was unlikely to be good enough
+and have accepted fatalistically anything which could possibly be made
+to do.
+
+Just why our little group of a dozen or so should have united on a
+musical basis and have expressed itself in a weekly "sing" I might find
+it hard to explain. None of us fellows was especially blessed with a
+voice; and the various Gertrudes and Adeles that met with us were
+assuredly without any marked sanction to vocalize. Possibly the "sing"
+was the mere outcome of youthful exuberance and of the tendency of young
+and eager molecules to crystallize into what came, later, to be termed a
+"bunch."
+
+As for Raymond himself, he never sang at all. "Oh, come, Rayme; join
+in!" the other fellows would suggest--and suggest in vain.
+
+"I'm doing _my_ part," he would return, giving the piano-stool a nearer
+hitch to the keyboard.
+
+In fact, it was his specific function to preside at the Chickering, the
+Weber, the Steinway, according to the facilities offered by the
+particular home--for we moved about in rotation. This service, which we
+presently came to consider sufficient in itself, dispensed him from
+exhibiting his nature in so articulate a thing as actual vocal
+utterance. This he was quite opposed to: he would never even try a hymn
+in church. But he could accompany; he could improvise; he could
+modulate; he could transpose any simple air. The ease and readiness with
+which he did all this made less obvious--indeed, almost
+imperceptible--his fundamental unwillingness to abandon himself before
+others (especially if members of his own circle) to any manifestation
+that might be taxed with even a remote emotionalism. And yet, at that
+very time, he was laying the foundations of a claim to be that broad and
+vague thing called an "artist." Even as early as this, apparently, he
+was troubled by two contradictory impulses: he wanted to be an artist
+and give himself out; and he wanted to be a gentleman and hold himself
+in. An entangling, ruinous paradox.
+
+This comment on Raymond's musical inclinations and musical services may
+require a bit of shading: I believe that, after all, he never quite
+cared for music unless he had, in all literalness, his "hand" in it. He
+never liked to hear any one else play the piano, still less the violin;
+concerts of all sorts were likely to bore him; and he never really rose
+to an understanding of the more recondite and elaborate musical forms:
+to have his fingers on the keyboard--especially when improvising in a
+secure inarticulateness--was his great desideratum.
+
+In our little group we ran from seventeen to nineteen; some of us just
+finishing high school, others just on the edge of college, others (like
+myself) engaged in professional studies, and still others making a début
+in business as clerks. We sang mostly the innocent old songs, American
+or English, of an earlier day, and sometimes the decorous numbers from
+the self-respecting operetta recently established in London. No
+contributions from a new and dubious foreign element had yet come to
+cheapen our taste, to disturb our nervous systems, or to throw upon the
+negro, the Hawaiian, or the Argentine the onus of a crass passion that
+one was more desirous of expressing than of acknowledging. No; there was
+assuredly no excess of emotional life--whether good or bad--in the body
+of music we favored. Perhaps what our little circle really desired was
+simply good-fellowship and a high degree of harmonious clamor. Certainly
+all our doings, whether on Friday evening, or on the other forenoons,
+afternoons, and evenings of the week, were quite devoid of an
+embarrassing sex-consciousness. We "trained together," as the expression
+went--all the fellows and all the Gertrudes and Adeles--with no sense of
+_malaise_, and postponing, or setting aside, in the miraculous American
+fashion, all sexual considerations whatsoever.
+
+I hardly know just why I should have thought that Johnny McComas could
+be introduced successfully into this circle. Johnny, as he had told us
+in his suburb, had cut loose from his parents. He was now living on his
+own, in a neighborhood not far from ours--from his, as it had once been.
+One evening I ventured to bring him round. He developed an obstreperous
+baritone--it was the same voice, now more specifically in action, that I
+had first heard on the devastated prairie; and he made himself rather
+preponderant, whether he happened to know the song or not.
+
+"Why, you're quite an addition!" commented one of the girls, in
+surprise--almost in consternation.
+
+"He is, indeed,--if he doesn't drown us all out!" muttered one of the
+fellows, behind his back.
+
+Yes, Johnny was vociferous--so long as the singing went on. But he
+developed, besides an obstreperous voice, an obstreperous interest in
+one of our Adeles--a piercing soprano who was our mainstay; and he
+showed some tendency to defeat the occasion by segregating her in a bay
+window. Segregation was the last of our aims, and Johnny did not quite
+please. Furthermore, Johnny seemed to feel himself among a lot of boys
+who were yet to make their "start," overlooking the fact that Raymond
+was in the bank, and ignorant of the further fact that one of our
+fellows was just beginning to be a salesman in a bond house. Johnny
+became violently communicative about the attractions of Dellwood Park
+and seemed to want to figure demonstratively in the eyes of Gertrude and
+Adele as an up-and-coming paladin of the business world. To most of us
+he seemed too self-assertive, too self-assured. He knew too clearly what
+he wanted, and showed it too clearly. Indeed it became apparent to me
+that while a boy of twelve may be accepted easily (at least in an early,
+simple society), a youth of eighteen cannot altogether escape the issues
+of caste. It was borne in on me presently that Johnny might as well have
+remained away. In fact--
+
+"We shan't need him again," said the brother of the soprano to me, as
+the evening broke up.
+
+And Raymond himself remarked to me a day later:--
+
+"Don't push him; he'll get along without your help."
+
+
+IV
+
+While the rankness of new elements in a new era had not penetrated our
+homes, it had begun to make itself manifest in public places. The town,
+within sixty years, had risen from a population of nearly _nil_ to a
+population of some five or six hundred thousand; and it was only in due
+course, perhaps, that "vice" now raised its head and that a "criminal
+class" came into effective, unabashed functioning. It was to be many
+years before the better elements learned how to combine for an efficient
+opposition to impudent evils. A heterogeneous populace, newly arrived,
+was still willing to elect mayors of native blood; but one of these,
+elected and reëlected to the town's lasting harm, might as well have
+been of the newer, and wholly exterior, tradition: a genial,
+loose-lipped demagogue who saw an opportunity to weld the miscellany of
+discrepant elements into a compact engine for the furtherance of his own
+coarse ambitions, and who allowed his supporters such a measure of
+license as was needed to make their support continuing. A shameless new
+quarter suddenly obtruded itself with an ugly emphasis; unclassifiables,
+male and female, began to assert and disport themselves more daringly
+than dreamt of heretofore; and many good citizens who would crowd the
+town forward to a population of a million and to a status undeniably
+metropolitan came to stroll these tawdry, noisy new streets with a
+curiosity of mind at once disturbed, titillated, and somehow gratified.
+Said some: "This is a new thing; do we quite like it?" Said others: "The
+town is certainly moving ahead; we don't know but that we do."
+
+Yes, a good many social observers set forth to see for themselves the
+new phenomena and to appraise the value of them in the coming political
+and social life of the community. Of course, many of these observers
+were too young and heedless to draw inferences from the sudden flood of
+new bars and bright lights and crass tunes and youthful creatures in
+short skirts who seemed not quite to know whether their proper element
+was the stage above or the range of tables below; in fact, these
+observers waived all attempt at speculative thought and became
+participants.
+
+Raymond and I had heard comments on the new developments from our
+elders; we were not without our own curiosity (though we had enough
+fastidiousness not to graze things very close, still less to wade into
+them very deep), and we decided one evening that we would look into two
+or three of these new and notable places of public entertainment.
+
+The first of them offered little. The second of them developed Johnny
+McComas. He sat at a table, talking too familiarly, or at least too
+forbearingly, with a rubicund, hard-faced man in shirt-sleeves standing
+at his elbow--probably the head of the place, or his first aide; and he
+was buying obviously unnecessary glasses of things for two of the young
+creatures in short skirts--Gertrudes and Adeles of that particular
+stratum, or Katies and Maggies, if preferred. Johnny sat there happy
+enough: an early example of the young business warrior diverting himself
+after the fray. Years afterward the scene came back to me when I met
+with a showy painting in the resonant new lobby of one of the greater
+hotels. It showed a terrace overlooking some placid Greek sea; the happy
+warrior standing ungirt and uncasqued, with a beautiful maiden of
+indeterminate status seated beside him; a graceful attendant holding a
+wreath above each happy and prosperous head, and a group of sandaled
+dancing-girls lightly footing it for the pleasure of the fortunate pair;
+the whole scene illuminated by the supreme, smiling self-satisfaction of
+the relaxed soldier amid the pipings of peace. So Johnny; he had earned
+the money and won the right to spend it in pleasure; his, too, the duty
+of refreshing himself for the strenuous morrow.
+
+He saw us and nodded. "Life!"--that was what he seemed to say. He made a
+feint to interest us in his companions; but they were poor things, as we
+knew, and as he must have known too. He left them without much regret
+and without much ceremony, and took us on to the next place.
+
+"It's life, isn't it?" he said in so many words.
+
+Raymond's nose went up disdainfully. "Life!" Some such manifestations,
+if properly handled and framed, might be life in Paris, perhaps; but he
+could not accept them as life here at home, within a mile or two of his
+own study. What this evening offered him seemed to require a
+considerable touch of refining before it could reach acceptance. It was
+all only an imperfectly specious substitute for life, only a coarse
+parody on life. The town, he told me the next day, made him think of a
+pumpkin: it was big and sudden and coarse-textured. "I've had enough of
+it," he added; "I want something different, and something a lot better."
+
+Johnny, as I say, took us to the next place; we might not have known how
+to take ourselves there. Johnny honestly liked the glare, the noise, the
+uproarious music, and the human press both on the sidewalks and in the
+packed, panting interiors. I liked it all, too,--for once in a way; but
+I soon saw that, for Raymond, even once in a way was once too often. In
+this last place a girl with a hand too familiarly laid on his arm gave
+the finishing touch; it was a coarse, dingy little hand, with some
+tawdry rings. Raymond never liked close quarters; neither in those days,
+nor ever after, did he care to come decisively to grips with actual
+life. "Keep off!" was what his look said to the offender. The poor,
+puzzled little débutante quickly stepped back, and we all regained the
+street. Raymond was trembling with embarrassment and vexation.
+
+"Why, you were making a hit," said Johnny.
+
+"Let's get home," said Raymond to me, ignoring Johnny. "This is enough,
+and more than enough. What a hole this town is coming to be!"
+
+
+V
+
+Raymond stayed on at the bank, though--if one might judge by his words
+and actions--with no enthusiasm in the present and no hopefulness for
+the future. He did what he had to do, and did it fairly well; but there
+was no sign that he was looking forward, and there remained scant
+likelihood that he would meet the expectations of his father and
+grandfather by mastering the business. On the contrary, I think he
+actually set his face against it: he seemed as resolute not to learn
+banking as he had been resolute not to learn dancing. Professor Baltique
+and the little girls in light-soled shoes and bright-colored sashes had
+given him up in the waltz; and it looked as if James B. Prince must
+presently renounce all hope of his ever learning how to turn the
+collective spare cash of many depositors to profit. I recall the day
+when the chief little light of the dancing-class, after some moments of
+completely static tramplings by Raymond in the midst of the floor,
+suddenly began to pout and to frown, and then left him in the midst of
+the dance and of the company and came to tears before she could reach an
+elder sister by the side wall. Raymond accepted the incident without
+comment. If his demeanor expressed anything, it expressed his
+satisfaction at carrying a point.
+
+But he did not wait until a vexed and disappointed bank left him high
+and dry. Though he must have known that many young clerks in the office
+envied him his billet and that many young fellows outside it would have
+been glad to get in on any terms whatever, he never gave a sign that he
+valued his opportunity; and when he finally pulled out it was with no
+regard to any possible successor.
+
+The younger men in the bank were a rather trim lot, and were expected to
+be. They did wonders, in the way of dressing, on their sixty or
+seventy-five dollars a month. Raymond's own dressing, for some little
+time past, had grown somewhat slack and careless. I did him the
+injustice of supposing that he felt himself to be himself, and _hors
+concours_ so far as the general body of clerklings was concerned; but he
+had other reasons.
+
+He had given up buying books and periodicals; no new volumes to be seen
+in his room except works of travel (preferably guide-books) and grammars
+and dictionaries of foreign languages. For all such works of general
+uplift and inspiration as the intending tourist in Europe might expect
+to profit by, he depended on circulating libraries or the shelves of
+friends. I myself lent him a book of travels in the Dolomites, and
+scarcely know, now, whether I did well or ill. Raymond, in short, was
+silently, doggedly saving, with the intention of taking a trip--or of
+making a sojourn--abroad.
+
+The cleavage came in James Prince's front parlor, one Sunday afternoon,
+and I happened to be present. A very few words sufficed. Raymond's
+father had picked up a thick little book from the centre-table, the only
+book in the room, and was looking back and forth between this work--an
+Italian dictionary--and Raymond himself.
+
+"What do you expect to get out of this?" he asked.
+
+"I expect to learn some Italian," Raymond replied.
+
+"Wouldn't French be more useful?"
+
+"I know all the French I need."
+
+"Where do you expect to use your Italian?"
+
+"In Italy. I didn't go to college."
+
+Impossible to depict the quality of Raymond's tone in speaking these
+five words. There was no color, no emphasis, no seeming presentation of
+a case. It was the cool, level statement of a fact; nor did he try to
+make the fact too pertinent, too cogent. An hour-long oration would not
+have been more effective. He had calmly taken off a lid and had
+permitted a look within. His father saw--saw that whatever Raymond, by
+plus or by minus, might be, he was no longer a boy.
+
+"I know," said James Prince, slowly. He was looking past us both and was
+opening and shutting the covers of the book unconsciously.
+
+A day or two later, Raymond gave me the rest. His father had asked him
+how much money he had. Out of his sixty or seventy-five a month Raymond
+had set aside several hundreds; "and I said I could make the rest by
+corresponding for some newspaper," he continued. This was in the simple
+day when travel-letters from Europe were still printed and read in the
+newspapers, and even "remunerated" by editors. Incredible, perhaps, in
+this day; yet true for that.
+
+His father had asked him how long he intended to be away. Raymond was
+non-committal. He might travel for a year, or he might try "living" there
+for a while--a long while. A matter of funds and of luck, it seemed. His
+father, without pressing him closely, offered to double whatever sum he
+had saved up. He appeared neither pleased nor displeased by Raymond's
+course. He felt I suppose, that the bank would hardly suffer, and that
+Raymond (whom he did not understand) might get some profit. Fathers have
+their own opinions of sons, which opinions range, I dare say, all the
+way from charitableness to desperation. In the case of my own son, I am
+glad to say, a very slight degree of charitableness was all the tax laid
+upon me. There were some distressing months of angularity, both in
+physique and in manners, at seventeen; then a quick and miraculous
+escape into trimness and grace. And my grandson, now at nine, promises
+to be, I am glad to state, even more of a success and a pleasure. As for
+Raymond, he had developed unevenly: his growth had gone athwart.
+Possibly the "world," that vast, vague entity of which his father's
+knowledge was restricted almost to one narrow field, might aid in
+straightening the boy out.
+
+"Well, try it for a year," his father said, not unkindly, and almost
+wistfully.
+
+
+VI
+
+When Johnny McComas heard of Raymond's resolve, he drew up his round
+face into a grimace. He thought the step queer, and he said so. But,
+"Oh, well, if a fellow can afford it!" he added. And he did not explain
+just what meaning he attached to the word "afford."
+
+But Johnny could see no valid reason for a fellow's giving the town the
+go-by at nineteen and at just that stage of the town's development.
+Johnny was so made that the community which housed him was necessarily
+the centre of the cosmos; he himself, howsoever placed, was necessarily
+at the centre of the circle--so why leave the central dot for some vague
+situation on the circumference? And take this particular town: what a
+present! what a future! what a wide extension over the limitless prairie
+with every passing month!--a prairie which merely needed to be cut up
+into small checkers and sold to hopeful newcomers; a prairie which
+produced profits as freely as it produced goldenrod and asters; a
+prairie upon which home-seekers might settle down under agents whose
+wide range, running from helpful coöperation to absolute flimflam, need
+leave no competent "operator" other than rich.
+
+"What are you going to get out of it?" asked Johnny earnestly.
+
+Raymond attempted no set reply. Johnny, he recognized, was out for
+positive results, for tangible returns; his idea was to get on in the
+world by definite and unmistakable stages. Raymond never welcomed the
+idea of "getting on"--not at least in the sense in which his own day and
+place used the expression. To do so was but to acknowledge some early
+inferiority. Raymond was not conscious of any inferiority to be
+overcome. Johnny might, of course, on this particular point, feel as he
+chose.
+
+About this time old Jehiel Prince began to come more frequently to his
+son's house. He was yellower and grayer, and he was getting testy and
+irascible. He sometimes brought his lawyer with him, and the pair made
+James Prince an active participant in their concerns. However, Jehiel
+was perhaps less unhappy here than in his own home. When there, he sat
+moodily alone, of evenings, in his basement office; and Raymond, who was
+sometimes sent over with documents or with messages, impatiently
+reported him to me as "glum."
+
+"Poor old fellow! he doesn't know how to live!" said Raymond in
+complacent pity. He himself, of course, had but to assemble all the
+bright-hued elements that awaited him a few months ahead to make his own
+life a poem, a song.
+
+"I can do that," he once said, in a moment when exaltation had briefly
+made him confidential.
+
+Raymond never saw his grandmother--at least he never cared to see her.
+Here, if nowhere else, he was willing to take a cue, and he took it from
+the head of the family. He thought that so many years of town life might
+have made her a little less rustic in the end: the York State of 1835 or
+of 1840 need not have remained York State so immitigably. And if there
+was a domestic blight on the house he was willing to believe that she
+was two thirds to blame: behind the old soul was a pack of poor
+relations. Particularly a brother-in-law--a bilious, cadaverous fellow,
+whom I saw once, and once was enough. He had been an itinerant preacher
+farther East, and he lived in a woeful little cottage along one of
+Jehiel's horse-car routes. His mournful-eyed wife was always asking
+help. He too had "gone into real-estate," and unsuccessfully. He was the
+dull reverse of that victorious obverse upon which Johnny McComas was
+beginning to shine.
+
+Another of her relatives, a niece, had married a small-town sharper. He
+had brought her to the larger town, and his sharpness had taken on a
+keener edge. He, too, had gone into real-estate--a lean, wiry little
+man, incredibly arid and energetic, and carrying a preposterously large
+mustache. There was trouble with him after Jehiel's death. It developed
+that one of the documents which old Beulah Prince had been cajoled or
+hectored into signing had deeded to him--temporarily and for a specific
+purpose--some forty acres of purple and yellow prairie flowers,
+delightful blossoms nodding and swaying in the wind, and that he had
+refused to deed more than half of them back: his services at that
+particular juncture were "worth something," he said. Well, life (as may
+have been remarked previously) would be quite tolerable without one's
+relatives. Meanwhile the summer flowers bloomed and nodded on, under the
+windy blue sky, all unaware of their disgrace.
+
+A month after Raymond's decision, flowers (of the sort favored in
+cemeteries) were trying to bloom over old Jehiel. Some stroke, some
+lesion, had put a period to the unhappy career of this grim old man.
+Raymond set to one side, for a few weeks, his new trunk and portmanteau;
+for a few weeks only--he had no notion of making, ultimately, any great
+change in his plans. It was obvious that James Prince was looking
+forward to a year or two of harassing procedure in the courts, for old
+Jehiel's estate was unlikely to smooth out with celerity; but Raymond
+was clearly of no use at home, even as a mere source of sympathy. A
+fortnight after his grandfather's funeral he was off.
+
+The singing-class would have given him good-bye in a special session;
+but his eyes were now on brighter matters and the vocalizing Gertrudes
+and Adeles were dim. He got out of it. Besides, the affair might come to
+involve something like ceremony; and he was always desirous of avoiding
+(save in the arts) the ceremonial side of life. When he came back from
+his first sojourn on the Continent he was a young man of mark, as things
+went in our particular town and time; or, rather, he might have been
+such, had he but chosen. The family fortunes were then merely at the
+stage of worry and still far from that of impending disaster. Raymond
+came back with money, position, and a certain aureole of personal
+distinction--just the sort of young man who would be asked to act as
+usher at a wedding. He _was_ asked repeatedly; but he never acted, and
+his excuses and subterfuges for avoiding such a service almost became
+one of the comedies of the day. He had no relish for seeing himself
+walking ceremonially up a church aisle under the eyes of hundreds, and
+I knew better than to ask him to walk up any aisle for me. He never did
+the thing but once, and that was under the inescapable compulsion of his
+fiancée--who, for her part, insisted on eyes and plenty of them. A man
+may never cease to be astonished at the workings of feminine preferences
+on such an occasion, but can hardly escape accommodating himself to
+them. Gertrudes are Gertrudes.
+
+But the wedding is years ahead, while the departure for Europe is
+imminent. Raymond had a tepid, awkward parting with his mother, whose
+headaches would not allow her to go to the train; and he shook hands
+rather coldly and constrainedly with his father, who would have
+welcomed, as I guess, some slight show of filial warmth, and he threw an
+embarrassedly facetious word to me about the weight of his portmanteau,
+and so was off. And it was years, rather than months, before he came
+back.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+I
+
+
+While Raymond was taking his course abroad, Johnny McComas was shaping
+his course at home. A colorless, unbiased statement--as it was meant to
+be; one which, despite the slight difference between "taking" and
+"shaping," has no slant and displays no animus. Colorless, yes; too
+colorless, perhaps you will object. If so, I will reword the matter.
+While Raymond, then, was in Europe cultivating his gentler faculties,
+Johnny remained in America, strengthening certain specific powers. Or,
+again: while Raymond was preparing, or so he thought, for a desirably
+decorative place in the "world" (the world at large), Johnny was
+qualifying himself, as he felt sure, for an important and remunerative
+position in that particular section of the world to which he had decided
+to confine his endeavors. And if you ask me, after I have colored a
+colorless statement, to bias an unbiased one, I shall refuse. I am not
+taking sides. Each of them was following his own likings--not the worst
+of rules for a growing and avid organism.
+
+Raymond wrote, of course,--it was impossible that he should not; and I
+think I showed one or two of his early letters to Johnny. Johnny was not
+exactly interested; vistas were opened for which he had no eyes and
+which possessed no appositeness to his own aims.
+
+"Still over there, eh?" he asked, on my producing a second letter.
+"These are the years that count," he added. He was probably implying
+that the final score would make a better showing for the man who spent
+those years in his native and proper environment.
+
+He disregarded the general drift of the letters, but hit upon one or two
+novel expressions, and repeated them, half-quizzical, half-intrigue.
+
+"Still over there," I echoed. A developing nature, I felt, must reach
+out for whatever it needs; and, in simpler form, I said so.
+
+"Well, I'm no misfit," he rejoined briefly. To "feel at home" at
+home--that, I presume, was the advantage he was asserting.
+
+Johnny, "at home," was not long in outgrowing the opportunities of
+Dellwood Park. Though he did not make, quite yet, the central district,
+a year or two later found him in an older and more important suburb--one
+that had passed the first acuteness of speculation and had pretty well
+settled down to a regulated life. It was not a suburb of the first rank,
+nor even perhaps of the second; but it suited his tastes and his present
+purposes. The new business combined banking and real-estate, and the
+banking department even maintained a small safety-deposit vault. There
+was also some insurance; and a little of mortgage-broking. Johnny was a
+highly prized element in this business and was pleased from the start
+with the outlook.
+
+"A fellow," he said, "can pick up more experience out there in a month
+than he could in one of these big downtown offices in a year."
+
+Nearly two years passed before I was to see him in his new environment.
+There came up a bit of business for a suburban client of mine which
+could as well be settled at Johnny's place as at another. It needed no
+more than a glance to perceive that Johnny was the dominant factor of
+the little institution. His was the biggest roller-top seen through a
+maze of gilt letters on a vast sheet of plate glass by commuters turning
+the corner morning and evening. His, too, chiefly, the deference of
+clerks and office-boy. He was ruddy and robust, and seemed likely to
+impose himself anywhere, when the time came. Thus far, a small Forum,
+perhaps; but he was the Cæsar in it. He did not disdain to attend to my
+affair himself; he even showed an emphatic, if not ponderous,
+_bonhomie_.
+
+Just as I was getting up to leave, a man of forty-five or more, with the
+general aspect of a contractor's foreman, put in his head. It was
+Johnny's father.
+
+"I guess you know George Waite," Johnny said to him; "and I guess he
+knows you."
+
+We shook hands, under Johnny's direction, and said that he was right.
+His father's hand--rough and with a broken nail or two--was that of a
+superintendent who on occasion helped with a plank or a mortarboard. He
+had an open face and a pleasant manner; he was not at all the dominant
+personage I remembered meeting in that "yard," years ago. Johnny, it
+seemed, was putting up a row of small houses on the suburb's edge, and
+his father was supervising the job. Johnny was pretty direct in saying
+what he wanted done, or not done, in connection with this work; and if
+his father made a suggestion it was as likely as not to be overruled. He
+was only one of the senators in Johnny's little curia, and probably far
+from the most important of them.
+
+Johnny's father got away, after all, before I did. Johnny asked me to
+stay for a little, and there was not much for a young professional man
+to do after catching the 4.52 into town. We sat for a while talking of
+indifferent matters. Johnny, surrounded by his own prosperity, asked
+with a show of interest, and without condescension, about my progress in
+the law, and I was replying with the cautious vagueness of one whose
+practice is not yet all he hopes it will be. During this time I had
+noticed, through the maze of gilt lettering, a limousine standing just
+round the corner. Its curtains were drawn: "an odd circumstance," I had
+commented inwardly. All of a sudden the street-door of the bank burst
+open, and three masked men, brandishing revolvers, rushed in.
+
+"You cover the cashier!" cried one; "we'll take care of the vault!"
+
+Johnny McComas flung open a drawer, seized a revolver of his own, sprang
+to his feet--
+
+Pardon me, dear reader. The simple fact is, I have suddenly been struck
+by my lack of drama. You see how awkwardly I provide it, when I try.
+What bank robbers, I ask you, would undertake such an adventure at
+half-past four in the afternoon? I cannot compete with the films. As a
+matter of fact, the vault stood locked, the tellers were gone, even the
+office-boy had stolen away, and Johnny and I were left alone together,
+exchanging rather feebly, and with increasing feebleness, some faint and
+unimportant boyhood reminiscences.... I feel abysmally abashed; let us
+open a new section.
+
+
+II
+
+As I have said, Raymond wrote. He wrote, for example, with a voluminous
+duteousness, to his parents. His letters to them, so far as they came to
+my notice, were curious; probably he meant that they should be saved and
+should become a sort of journal of his travels. They were almost
+completely impersonal. There was plenty of straight description; but
+beyond some slight indications of his own movements, past or intended,
+there was no narration. He never mentioned people he met; he never
+described his adventures--if he had any. He seemed to be saying to
+Europe, as Rastignac said to Paris, "_À nous deux, maintenant!_" He was
+at grips with the Old World, and that sufficed.
+
+His letters to me, however, were not devoid of personal reactions. These
+commonly took an æsthetic turn. An early letter from Rome had a good
+deal to say about the Baroque. He met it everywhere; it was an
+abomination; it tried his soul. Fontana and Maderna, the Gog and Magog
+of architecture, had flanked the portals of art and had let through a
+hideous throng of artificialities and corruptions.... The word "Baroque"
+was new to me, and I looked it up. I learned that it described, not a
+current movement, as I had supposed, but an influence which had
+exhausted itself nearly three hundred years ago. But it was still recent
+and real to Raymond. And I learned, further, that this style had modern
+champions who could say a good word for it. In any event, it might be
+accepted calmly as a valuable and characteristic link in the general
+historic chain.
+
+In another letter he was ecstatic over the Gothic brickwork of Cremona.
+It was so beautiful, he said in as many words, that it made his heart
+ache; not often did Raymond let himself go like that. Eager to follow
+his track--and to understand, if possible, his heart, however peculiar
+and baffling--I looked up, in turn, North Italian brickwork. This was
+twice three hundred years old. But it had stirred other modern hearts
+than Raymond's; for an English æsthete had tried (and almost succeeded)
+to impose it on his country as a living mode. "Very well," I said;
+"Italian brickwork may reasonably be accepted as a modern interest."
+
+Raymond, before descending to Italy, had spent some months in Paris.
+Circumstances had enabled him to frequent a few studios, and his first
+letter to me from that city had been rather technical and "viewy."
+Incidentally, he had seen something of the students, and had found
+little to approve, either in their manners or their morals. He left
+Paris without reporting any moral infractions of his own and settled
+down for some stay in Florence. He was studying the language further, he
+reported: a language, he said, which was easy to begin, but hard to
+continue--the longer you studied the less you really knew. However, he
+knew enough for daily practical purposes. His _pension_ was pleasant;
+small, and the few visitors were mostly English.
+
+But there were one or two Americans in the house, and they came home a
+few months later with their account of Raymond and his ways. It was
+needed; for the three or four letters that he had printed in one of our
+newspapers contained little beyond descriptions of set sights--to think
+we should have continued to welcome that sort of thing so long! Well,
+these people reported him as conscientiously busy, for his hour each
+day, with grammar and dictionary. He was also getting his hand in
+painting; and he had "taken on" musical composition, even to
+instrumentation. "Too many irons!" commented my lively young informant.
+"And I think I should get my painting in Paris and my music in Germany."
+She also said that Raymond had next to no social life--he showed hardly
+the slightest desire to make acquaintances.
+
+"An old Frenchman came to the place for a few days," she continued; "and
+as he was leaving he said your friend was living in an ivory tower--the
+windows few, the door narrow, and the key thrown away. 'Ivory tower'--do
+you understand what that means?"
+
+"No," I said. But of course I understand now.
+
+
+III
+
+As a consequence of my call at Johnny McComas's office (or as a probable
+consequence), I received, some six months later, an invitation to his
+wedding. You will expect to hear that I was present, and perhaps acted
+as usher, or even as best man. Nothing of the sort was the case,
+however; I was absent at the time in the East. Nor are you to imagine me
+as continually following, at close range, the vicissitudes, major and
+minor, which made up his life, or made up Raymond's. An exact, perpetual
+attendance of fifty years is completely out of the question. Don't
+expect it.
+
+Johnny married, I was told, a young woman living in his own suburb, the
+daughter of a manufacturer of some means. I met him about two months
+after his great step. He was still full of the new life, and full of the
+new wife.
+
+"She's fine!" he declared. "Not too fine, but fine enough for me."
+
+He cocked his hat to one side.
+
+"Do you know, I talk to her just as I would to a man."
+
+"Johnny!" I began, almost gasping.
+
+"Well, what's wrong? Ever said anything much out of the way to you? Ever
+heard me say anything to any other fellow?"
+
+"Why, no...." I was obliged to acknowledge.
+
+"Then why the row? It's all easy as an old shoe. _She_ likes it."
+
+"I know. But--talking with a woman ... It isn't quite like...."
+
+"Don't make any mistake. Just have the big things right, and they'll
+overlook lots of the little ones."
+
+"H'm," I said doubtfully. "I supposed it was just the other way. Lay a
+lot of stress on certain little things, and larger shortcomings won't
+bother them. Bring her a bunch of flowers to-day, and she'll help you
+deed away the house and lot to-morrow."
+
+"Fudge!" said Johnny. "I mean the really big things. There's only two.
+Ground to stand on and air to breathe."
+
+"That is to say...?"
+
+"A platform under her feet and an atmosphere about her. Well, she's got
+me to stand on and to surround her. She understands it. She likes it.
+Nothing else matters much."
+
+"Ah!" said I.
+
+"I'm her bedrock, and I'm her--How do they say it? I'm her--envelopment,
+as those painting fellows put it."
+
+"See here, Johnny," I protested; "Don't get anachronistic. We are only
+in 1884. That expression won't reach America for ten or fifteen years.
+Have some regard for dates."
+
+"It won't? Wasn't it in your friend's letter?"
+
+"What friend?"
+
+"Why, Prince; when he was in Paris. Didn't you read it to me?"
+
+I remembered.
+
+"Do you know," he went on, "I've been straight as a string--ever since.
+And I'm going to keep so."
+
+"I should hope so, indeed."
+
+"Whatever I may have been before. But I think it's better for a young
+fellow to dash in and find out than to keep standing on the edge and
+just wonder."
+
+"Well, I don't know, Johnny," I returned soberly. "I'm going to be
+married myself, next month. And I expect to go to my bride just as
+pure--"
+
+"No preaching," said Johnny. "The slate's wiped clean. Adele's all right
+for me, and I'm all right to her."
+
+He adjusted his hat, making the two sides of the brim level.
+
+"We're going to move shortly," he stated. "The business can go on where
+it is, for a while, but we're going to live somewhere else."
+
+Perhaps in the city itself, it appeared; perhaps in some suburb toward
+the north. But no longer in one to the west. Johnny was developing some
+such scent for social values and some such feeling for impending
+topographical changes as had begun to stir the great houses that were
+grouped about the Princes.
+
+"So you're the next one?" he said presently. "It's the only life. Good
+luck to you. And who's going to see you through? Prince?"
+
+"Yes--'my friend.' I'm glad you remember him."
+
+"Oh yes; I can remember him when I try. But I don't try very hard or
+very often. Back in this country?"
+
+"He is."
+
+"What's he doing?" Johnny fixed his hard blue eyes firmly on me.
+
+I was sorry to have no very definite answer. "He has been in the East
+lately. He'll be back here in time for me."
+
+"Well," said Johnny darkly; and that was all.
+
+
+IV
+
+Raymond's "tower" was not static, but peripatetic. Early in his second
+summer abroad it was standing among the Dutch windmills for a brief
+season; and when he learned that I was to have a short vacation in
+England--the only quarter of the Old World I ever cared for--he left it
+altogether for a fortnight and came across from Flushing to see me.
+
+Two points immediately made themselves clear. Firstly, he was viewing
+the world through literature--through works of fiction in some cases,
+through guide-books in more. Everything was a spectacle, with himself
+quite outside as an onlooker; and nothing was a spectacle until it had
+been ranged and appraised in print. Secondly, if he was outside of
+things, America was still farther outside; it existed as a remote
+province not yet drawn into the activities and interests of the "world."
+He seemed willing, even anxious, to make himself secondary, subordinate.
+However he may have been on the Continent, here in England his desire to
+conform made him appear subservient and almost abject. My own unabashed
+and unconscious Americanism--the possible consequence of
+inexperience--sometimes embarrassed him, and he occasionally undertook
+to edit my dealings with members of the older half of our race, even
+with waiters and cabmen. As for the more boastful, aggressive,
+self-assertive sort of Americanism, _that_ would make him tremble with
+anger and blush for shame.
+
+I will say this in his behalf, however: he did not like England and was
+not at home there.
+
+"The little differences," he observed, one day, "made more trouble than
+the big ones. A minor seventh is all right, while a minor second is
+distressing. I am happier among the Latins."
+
+Yet I am sure that even among his Latins he took the purely objective
+view and valued their objects of interest according as they were starred
+and double-starred, or left unmarked in the comparative neglect of small
+print.
+
+We saw together Canterbury and Cambridge and Brighton and a few other
+approved places. Through all these he walked with a meticulous
+circumspection, wondering what people thought, asking inwardly if he
+were squaring with their ideas of what conduct should be. Only once did
+I find him fully competent and sufficiently assertive. The incident
+occurred on a late afternoon, in a small side street just off the
+Strand, while I was casting about for one of those letter-pillars.
+Raymond was approached, as was proper to the locality and the time of
+day, by a young woman of thirty who had a hard, determined face and who
+was clothed on with a rustling black dress that jingled with jet. I was
+near enough to hear.
+
+"Good-afternoon," she said.
+
+"Good-afternoon."
+
+"Where," with marked expressiveness, "are you going?"
+
+"I'm going to stand right here."
+
+"Give me a drink."
+
+"Couldn't think of it."
+
+"Stand," she said, with sudden viciousness, "stand and rot!"
+
+Raymond, after an instant's surprise, made a response in his unstudied
+vernacular. "Yes, _I'll_ stand; but you skip. Shoo!"
+
+She was preparing some retort, but he waved both his hands, wide out, as
+if starting a ruffled, vindictive hen across a highway. At the same time
+he caught sight of a constable on the corner, and let her see that he
+saw--
+
+"Constable!"--why, I am as bad as Raymond himself: I mean, of course,
+policeman.
+
+But the London police are sometimes chary in the exercise of their
+functions. What really started the woman on her way was his next brief
+remark, accompanied by the hands, as before, though with a more decided
+shade of propulsion.
+
+"Scoot!" She went, without words.
+
+These were the only American observations I heard from Raymond during
+that fortnight.
+
+I wish he had been as successful on the night of our arrival in London
+when we encountered, in the court behind the big gilded grille of the
+Grand Metropole, the porter of that grandiose establishment. We had come
+together from Harwich and did not reach this hotel until half an hour
+before midnight. We had had our things put on the pavement and had
+dismissed the cab, and the porter, with an airy, tentative insolence,
+now reported the place full.
+
+"_I_ don't know who ordered your luggage down, sir; _I_ didn't," he said
+with a smile that was an experiment in disrespect.
+
+Raymond looked as if he were for immediately adjusting himself to
+this--though I could hardly imagine his ever having done the like in
+Paris or in Florence. He was quite willing to confess himself in the
+wrong: yes, he ought to have remembered that the "season" was beginning;
+he ought to have known that this particular season, though young, had
+set in with uncommon vigor; he ought to have known that all the hotels,
+even the largest, were likely to be crowded and have sent on a wire. The
+porter, emboldened by the departure of the cab, and by my companion's
+contrite silence, began to embroider the theme.
+
+Now a single week in England had taught me that no two men in that
+country--the home of political but not of social democracy--are likely
+to talk long on even terms. One man must almost necessarily take the
+upper hand and leave to the other the lower, and the relation must be
+reached early. I resolved on the upper--cab or no cab. I glared--as well
+and as coldly as I could. The fellow was only a year or so older than I.
+
+"You are too chatty," I said. "Fewer words and more action. If you are
+full, call somebody to take us and our baggage to some hotel near by
+that is not full."
+
+The fellow sobered down and gave us his first look resembling respect.
+
+"Very good, sir. I will, sir. Thank you, sir,"--though he had nothing to
+thank me for, and though he well knew there was to be nothing.
+
+Raymond looked at me as one looks at a friend who surprises by the
+sudden disclosure of some unexpected talent or power.
+
+"But you said 'baggage,'" he commented.
+
+"Indeed I did," said I.
+
+
+V
+
+Our new hotel, we discovered next morning, was duplicated in name by
+another, four doors down the street. During the day we heard the reason
+for this. A domestic difficulty had overtaken husband and wife and the
+two had separated, each keeping an interest in the serviceable name and
+a frontage on the familiar street. We were in the husband's hotel, under
+the very discreet ministrations of the young woman who had caused the
+break. "Do you quite like this?" Raymond had asked me. But he became
+reassured on seeing in the guest-book the names of two or three
+well-known and sufficiently respected compatriots. By the next day he
+was able to cast on Miss Brough, as she flitted (still discreetly)
+through her functions, the eye of a qualified idealization. I am sure he
+would never have viewed indulgently any such situation at home. But the
+poor, patient, cautious girl helped him toward realizing the
+sophistications and corruptions of European society, and so he welcomed
+her. But I believe he avoided speaking to her. She may have been hurt,
+or she may have been amused; or neither. Yet, after all, this
+_contretemps_ was for him, I felt, but a prosaic substitute for
+something richer. A similar situation in Naples, say, taken at close
+range, might have quickened his interest considerably.
+
+Next day there was something different for him to report. He had gone
+into a courtyard off Holborn, drawn by the sound of a hurdy-gurdy. Four
+or five little girls were dancing, and some older women stood looking
+on. For a few moments he looked on too, probably with an effect of aloof
+and amused patronage. But patronage was not for that court.
+
+Presently one of the younger women, who wore a hat full of messy plumes
+and carried a small fish in each hand by the tail, stepped up and
+invited him to trip a measure with her. "Trip a measure"--it has a fine
+Elizabethan or Jacobean sound, whether she used the precise expression
+or not. But Raymond demurred; at first politely; later, perhaps not so
+politely. But he was whisked into the dance and made to take several
+turns. He was so embarrassed that he called it all an "adventure."
+Possibly it was meant for a lesson in manners.
+
+Thus Raymond in England. As he said, he liked the Continent better. I
+hope he showed to better advantage there, and I should have liked to see
+him there--to be with him there. For he rather put a brake on any
+measure of exuberance and momentum which I might have brought to
+England with me, and I could only trust that his strait-jacket was
+partly unlaced among the French and Italians. I think that likely, for
+with them he was, of course, an acknowledged and unmistakable foreigner.
+But my fortnight with him was cramped and uncomfortable; and when we
+parted at the American Exchange--I for Liverpool and he for Calais--I
+confess I had a slight feeling of relief. I felt, too, that my conduct,
+however native and unstudied, had pleased the Island quite as well as
+his.
+
+At the Exchange itself he never read American newspapers--least of all,
+one from his own town. I believe, too, he avoided them on the Continent.
+Living a very special life, he meant to keep himself integral,
+uncontaminate. And behind us both was the other world, his own, all
+vital and astir.
+
+Yes, I am aware that my prose is pedestrian, and that Europe--as it once
+was, to us--deserves a brighter and higher note. I will attempt, just
+here, a purple patch.
+
+Europe, then,--the beacon, hope, and cynosure of our fresh, ingenuous
+youth--the glamorous realm afar which drew to itself from across the sea
+our eager artist-bands, pilgrims to the Old, the Stately, and the Fair;
+Europe, which reared above our dull horizon the towers of Oxford and of
+Notre Dame, sent up into our pale, empty sky the shimmering mirage of
+Venice, and cast across our workaday way the grave and noble shadow of
+Rome; Europe, which gave out through the varying voices of Correggio,
+Canova, Hugo, and Wagner the cry, so lofty and so piercing-sweet, of
+Art; Europe, which with titles and insignia and social grandeurs, once
+dazzled and bemused our inexperienced senses ... and so on.
+
+Easy!
+
+But worth while?
+
+I shall not attempt to decide.
+
+To-day Europe seems not all we once found it; and we, on the other hand,
+have come to be more than some of us at least once figured ourselves. We
+are beginning to have glamours and importances of our own.
+
+
+VI
+
+Raymond lingered on for a year or more in Italy, and came home, as I
+have implied, in time for my wedding. He found his native city more
+uncouth and unkempt than ever. Such it was, absolutely; and such it was,
+relatively, after his years under a more careful and self-respecting
+régime. The population was still advancing by leaps and bounds, and
+hopeful spirits had formed a One-Million Club. A few others, even more
+ardent, said that the population was already a million, or close upon
+it, and busied themselves to start a Two-Million Club. They had their
+eyes wide open to the advantage of numbers, and tightly closed to the
+palpable fact that the community was unable properly to house and
+administer the numbers it already had. The city seemed to cry: "I need a
+friendly monitor--one who will point me out the decencies and compel me
+to adopt them." The demagogue who had ruled and misruled before had been
+reëlected once or twice, and the newspapers were still indulging their
+familiar strain of irresponsible and ineffective criticism. The dark
+world behind him had become more populous and bold, and the forces for
+good still seemed unable to organize and coöperate toward making
+betterment an actuality. But new people were always flocking in--people
+from the farms, villages and country-towns of the Middle region--and
+bringing with them the uncontaminated rustic ideals of rightness and
+decorum: a clean stream pouring into a turbid pool, and the time was to
+come when it would make itself felt. Meanwhile, the city remained--to
+Raymond--a gross, sharp village, one full of folk who, whether from the
+Middle West or from Middle Europe, had never come within ten leagues of
+gentility, and who, one and all, were absorbedly and unabashedly bent on
+the object which had suddenly assembled them at this one favored
+spot--the pushing of their individual fortunes. A hauptstadt-to-be,
+perhaps; but, so far, an immensely inchoate and repellent miscellany.
+
+Raymond's father gave him a sober welcome. His mother attempted a brief,
+spasmodic display of affection; but it was too much, and only a maid
+and her pillows saw her for the next few days. His father seemed older,
+much older; tired, careworn, worried. The trouble of settling old
+Jehiel's estate had been all that could have been expected, and more.
+There were claims, complications, lawsuits, what not; and through all
+this maze James Prince had to put up with the inherited help of the dry,
+dismal old fellow whom I had seen in earlier days at the house. I had
+come, now, to a better professional knowledge of him. He was a man of
+probity, and of some ability, but a deliberate; impossible to hurry, and
+not easy, as it seemed, even to interest. Under him matters dragged
+dully through the courts, and others' nerves were worn to shreds. I
+remember how surprised I was one day on hearing that he had picked up
+enough resolution to die.
+
+Raymond did not much concern himself about his father's burdens. He
+assumed, I suppose, that such taxes on a man's brain and general
+vitality were proper enough to middle age and to the business life of a
+large city. However, he was living--just as he had principally lived
+abroad--on his father's bounty. His contributions to the press--whether
+a daily, or, of late, a monthly--brought in no significant sums; and a
+bequest of some size from his grandfather was slow in finding its way
+into his hands.
+
+As I have said, Raymond might have taken an advantageous position in
+home society. He made no effort, and I sometimes caught myself wondering
+if his attitude might be that there was "nobody here." He might have
+joined his father's club; but the older men principally played billiards
+and talked their business affairs between. However, he did not care for
+billiards, nor had their affairs any affinity with his. A younger
+set--noisy and assertive out of proportion to its numbers--gave him no
+consolation, still less anything like edification. They were _au
+premier plan_; they possessed no background; they were without
+atmosphere--without envelopment, as Johnny McComas might have amended it
+(though no such lack would have been noted or resented by Johnny
+himself). _Bref_, he knew what they all were without going to see. And
+as for "society," it rustled flimsily, like tissue-paper; bright, in a
+way, but still thin and crackling.
+
+I wonder how he found such society as attended my wedding. I shall not
+describe it; I did not describe Johnny's--probably the more important
+event of the two for the purposes of this calm narrative. Yet, if you
+will permit me, I shall touch on two points.
+
+I wish, first, to say that, in my ears and to my eyes, the name "Elsie"
+is just as dear and charming as it ever was. Perhaps, at one period of
+my courtship, I wondered if the name would wear. No name more delightful
+and suitable for a gay, arch, sweet young girl of twenty; but how, I
+asked myself, will the name sit on a woman of forty, or on one of sixty?
+Well, I will confess that, at forty, a certain strain of incongruity
+appeared; but it marvelously vanished during the following score of
+years, and the name now seems utterly right for the dainty figure and
+gentle face of my lifelong companion. And though our eldest daughter is
+unmarried and thirty-five, we have never regretted passing on this
+beautiful name to her.
+
+My second point must deal with Raymond's attitude toward me on my
+wedding-day and on the days preceding it. He was stiff, constrained,
+dissatisfied--merely courteous toward my Elsie, and not at all cordial
+to me. I wondered whether he blamed me for thus bringing him back home;
+but the real reason, as I came to understand later, was quite different.
+He regarded the marriage of a friend as a personal deprivation, and the
+bride as the chief figure in the conspiracy. After my defection, or
+misappropriation, he solaced himself by trying to make one or two other
+friendships. When these friends married in turn, like process produced
+like results. These men, however, he threw overboard completely; in my
+case, he showed, after a while, some relenting, and ultimately even
+forgiveness. By the time he came to marry on his own account, the last
+of his very few bachelor friends had "gone off"; so there was no chance
+of inflicting on anybody that displeasure which others had several
+times inflicted on him.
+
+He sent Elsie a suitable present, and stood beside me through the
+ceremony as graciously as he was able.
+
+"I wish you both great joy," he said firmly, at the end; and it was six
+weeks before we saw him in our little home.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+I
+
+
+Johnny McComas was still carrying on his business life and his home life
+in the suburb where he had married, when I came, finally, to make my
+first call on the domestic group of which he was the nub. Still in the
+future was the day when he was to move into town, and to have also a
+summer home on the North Shore, and to make some of his father-in-law's
+spare funds yield profitable results, and to arouse among wistful clerks
+and unsuccessful "operators" an admiring wonder as the youngest
+bank-president in the "Loop."
+
+I looked in on him one evening in late November. I found a house too
+emphatically furnished and a wife too concerned about making an
+impression. I did not consider myself a young man of prime consequence
+and did not relish the expenditure of so much effort: after all,
+Johnny's standing, Johnny's wife, Johnny's domestic _entourage_ were
+not before a judgment-bar. It was plain to see that for Mrs. John W.
+McComas complete social comfort had not yet been reached, and I wondered
+if the next move might not show it as farther away than ever.
+
+Johnny himself was bluff and direct, and took things as a matter of
+course. Much had been done, but more remained to be done; meanwhile all
+was well and good. After a little, his wife was content to leave us
+alone together, and we drifted to Johnny's "den"--a word new at that
+time, and descriptive of the only feature of his home on which he laid
+the slightest self-conscious emphasis.
+
+I had heard that there were twins--boys; and soon, as the evening was
+still young, I heard the twins themselves. They had reached the age of
+ten months, and consequently had developed wants, but no articulate
+means for making those wants known. Therefore they howled, and they
+began howling in unison now. Perhaps it was for them that a foresighted
+mother had left us alone together.
+
+"Great little hollerers!" said Johnny placidly, pulling at his pipe.
+
+I was still a bachelor. "Might shut the door?" I proposed.
+
+"If you like," said Johnny, without enthusiasm. "They wake me every
+morning at five," he added.
+
+Yes, I was still a bachelor--and probably a tactless, even a brutal,
+one.
+
+"Might move them to another bedroom, farther away?" I suggested. The
+house seemed big enough for such an arrangement.
+
+"Don't want to," declared Johnny. He began pulling at his pipe again,
+and there was a little silence during which I might meditate on the curt
+nobility of his remark.
+
+The fact was, of course, that Johnny loved life; he embraced it with
+gusto, with both arms outspread. No sidestepping its advances; no
+dodging its sharp angles; no feeble mitigating of a situation for which
+he was himself responsible; no paltry deadening of domestic uproar
+merely because he himself happened to be within the domestic
+environment. "If Adele stands it, I will too--they're mine as well as
+hers,"--such I conceive to have been his attitude. Johnny had no nerves,
+and only a minimum of sensibility. The sound-waves broke on his
+sensorium as ripples break on a granite coast. Perhaps they pleased him;
+perhaps they even soothed him. Why, bless you! these children were
+_his_! They were facts as great and as unescapable as the ebb and flow
+of the tides, as dawn and twilight, as the morning and evening stars.
+And the evening stars were singing together. Great may have been the
+jubilation for Johnny's ears, boundless the content in Johnny's heart.
+
+I really think that Johnny felt through the din some of the exhilaration
+that often came to him with a good brisk scrap in his office--or in the
+other man's office. In fact, home and business were Johnny's two sources
+of interest and pleasure--the warp and woof of his life--and he was
+determined on getting the utmost out of each. His interest in his home
+circle may somewhat have declined--or at least have moderated--with
+advancing years, but it was incandescent now. His interest in the
+outside world--that oyster-bin awaiting his knife--never slackened, not
+even when the futility of piling up the empty shells became
+daylight-clear, and when higher things strove perseveringly, even
+unmistakably, to beckon him on. Never, in fact, throughout his life did
+he exhibit more than two essential concerns: one for his family and
+clan; and one for the great outside mass of mediocre individuals through
+whose ineptitudes he justly expected to profit.
+
+Well, the door of the den remained open, and our talk went on to the
+rising and falling of infant voices. At last, thinking that my good-bye
+must be to Johnny only, I rose to go. You might reasonably ask for a
+clearer impression of his home and a more definite account of his wife.
+But what can I say when the primary address was so disconcertingly to
+the ear? Of his wife--who came down, during a lull, at the last
+moment--I can only say that she seemed too _empressée_ at the beginning
+and too casual at the end. Perhaps she had decided that, after all, I
+was no more than I myself claimed to be. Perhaps the infant hurricane
+was still ruffling the surface of her mind, or even disturbing its
+depths.
+
+"I won't ask you to call again," she said, as we shook hands for a
+good-night: "we shall be moving in the spring." She spoke with a
+satisfied air of self-recognized _finesse_, and as in the confident hope
+of completing very promptly some well-planned little programme; but--
+
+"Visit us there," said Johnny, with a quick cordiality which prevented
+his wife from redeeming herself.
+
+"There" had been the chief topic in the den. Many neighborhoods had been
+brought forward, with their attendant advantages and disadvantages.
+Johnny told me what he thought, and let me say what I thought. When I
+listened, it was as a man who might soon have a similar problem to
+consider. When I spoke it was to utter banalities sedately; any
+neighborhood might do, I said, that had good air; yes, and good
+schools--looking toward the future. And any house, I felt, would serve,
+if it had a nursery that was sealed, sound proof, remote....
+
+"Well, best luck in your search for your roof-tree," I said earnestly to
+them both.
+
+"'Roof-tree'!" echoed Johnny. And, in fact, my observation did seem
+rather artificial and insincere.
+
+
+II
+
+By the time Raymond reached home, Johnny McComas had turned his informal
+suburban enterprise into a "state" bank, with his father-in-law as
+president and himself as cashier. The father-in-law lent his name and
+furnished most of the capital; Johnny himself provided the driving
+power. And by the time Raymond had become, through his father's death,
+the head of the family and the controller of the family funds, Johnny
+had turned his state bank into a national bank, with its offices in the
+city and with himself as president; and he had bought--at a bargain--a
+satisfactory house on the edge of the neighborhood where we first met
+him. The street was marked for business advance more promptly and more
+unmistakably than the precise quarter of the Princes. It would do as a
+home for a few years. The transaction appealed both to McComas's thrift
+and his pride. The coming of his new little bank, with its modest
+capital, made no particular stir in the "street"; and the great group of
+houses to the eastward were so apprehensive of open outrage, in one form
+or another, that his approach, in a guise still social, provoked but
+scant concern.
+
+James Prince died when Raymond was about thirty. A careful, plodding man
+who had never brought any direct difficulties upon himself, but who had
+been worried--and worried out--through troubles left him by others. On
+the whole, he had found life an unrewarding thing; and he passed along,
+at fifty-five, with no great regrets. The tangle of family affairs had
+finally been straightened out in considerable measure, though Raymond
+found enough detail still left to make him realize what a five years his
+father had passed through; and when, the year following, his mother
+died, with the settlement of her estate almost overlapping the
+settlement of his father's, he acquired a new sense of the grinding,
+taxing possibilities of business. I speak from his own viewpoint; he was
+susceptible--unduly, abnormally so--to the grind and the tax. After a
+few months of clammy old Brand and his methods, he suddenly cut loose
+from him (without waiting for him to die, as he did a little later); and
+he told me that I was the man to wind up these tedious affairs. They
+were not nearly so difficult and complicated as they seemed to him--they
+were now largely routine matters, in fact; and I hope I carried things
+along at a tempo which satisfied him. This is not to deny that Raymond
+seemed to have days when he found even me dilatory and exasperating; but
+old Brand would probably have driven him mad.
+
+Well, the prospects of his estate were not too brilliant. The lawsuits
+had been expensive and sometimes unsuccessful; the bank had passed a
+dividend, and the old houses, which had meant a lot of money in their
+day, meant less now and even loss in a near future. The time was fast
+coming when this circumscribed and unprotected neighborhood was to
+admit other--and prejudicial--interests: boarding-houses, of course; and
+refined homes for inebriates; and correspondence-schools for engineers;
+and one of the Prince houses became eventually the seat of a
+publishing-firm which needed a little distinction more than it needed a
+wide spread of glass close to the sidewalk.
+
+Whatever the state of Raymond's fortunes, it was easy to see that they
+were not likely to improve in his hands. He detested business, both _en
+gros_ and _en détail_. Despite his ancestry, he seemed to have been born
+with no faculty for money-making, and he never tried to make up his
+deficiency. It was all of a piece with the stone-throwing of his boyhood
+days--he never attempted to improve himself: it was enough to follow the
+gifts with which he had been natively endowed. Precept, example,
+opportunity--all these went for naught. To the end of his days he viewed
+the American "business man" as a portentous and inexplicable
+phenomenon--one to be regarded with distaste and wonder. He persisted
+in thinking of the type as a juvenile one--an energetic and clever boy,
+who was immensely active and immensely productive of results (in an
+immensely limited field), but who was incapable of anything like an
+_aperçu_ or a _Weltanschauung_ (oh, he had plenty of words for it!), and
+who was essentially booked to lose much more than he gained. He disliked
+"offices" and abominated "hours." I think that even my own modest
+professional applications sometimes became a puzzle to him....
+
+And here I stand--convicted of having perpetrated another section
+without one short paragraph and without a single line of conversation.
+Let me hasten to bring Raymond to my suite and my desk-side, and make
+him speak.
+
+He came down one morning, as administrator of his mother's estate, to
+consider the appraisal of the personal property--many familiar items,
+and some discouraging ones.
+
+"Do you _have_ to do this?" he asked me, with the paper in his hand. "Do
+you _like_ to do it?"
+
+"The world's work," I rejoined temperately. "It's got to be done."
+
+"H'm!" he returned. "The world's a varied place. And its work is varied
+too. This blessed town must be taught that."
+
+Was he girding himself to be one of its teachers?
+
+From that time on I resolved to take him patiently and good-humoredly: a
+friend must bear a friend's infirmities.
+
+
+III
+
+I did not know, with precision, what phases of the world's work were
+engaging Raymond's attention. I suppose he was adventuring, rather
+vaguely, among the "liberal arts," though he probably saw, by this time,
+that a full professional exercise of any of them was beyond his reach.
+He was heard of as writing short essays and reviews for one or two
+genteel publications, as making water-color tours through the none too
+alluring suburbs, as composing minor pieces for a little musical society
+which he had joined and which he wished to advance, and so on.
+Acquaintances reported him at architectural exhibits and at
+book-auctions--occasions neither numerous nor important. He lived on
+alone in his father's house--expensively; too expensively, of course,
+for it was an exacting place to keep up.
+
+He was coming to be known in a small circle--but an influential one--as
+a young man of wealth, culture, and good-will. But his wealth was less
+than supposed, his culture was self-centred, and his good-will was
+neither broad nor zealous.
+
+However, the new day was coming when he could be turned to account--or
+when, at least, people made the attempt.
+
+This, however, does not mean philanthropy. That was barely dawning as a
+social necessity. The few who were supporting charitable institutions
+and were working in the recently evolved slums were neither conspicuous
+nor fashionable. Nor does it mean political betterment. No efforts had
+yet been successful in substituting for the city's executive incubus a
+man of worthier type, nor was there yet any effective organization
+founded on the assumption--which would have seemed remote and fantastic
+indeed--that a city council could be improved. Parlor lectures on civics
+were of course still farther in the future. Poor government was simply a
+permanent disability, like weather, or lameness, or the fashions; folk
+must get along as best they could in spite of it. The town remained a
+chaos of maladministration and of non-administration; but when the
+decencies are, for the time being, despaired of, one may still try for
+the luxuries. So the city girded itself for a great festival; the nation
+approved and coöperated, and a vast congeries of white palaces began to
+rise on our far edge.
+
+The detailed execution of this immense undertaking was largely local, of
+course. Though the work was initiated by older heads (some of them were
+too old and were dropped), there were places on the innumerable
+committees for younger ones--for men in their early thirties; their
+vigor, enthusiasm, and even initiative (within understood limits) would
+greatly further the cause. There were (among others) committees on
+entertainment to engage the services of young men of position, leisure,
+and social experience. There were many foreign dignitaries to be
+received and guided; there must be lively and presentable youths to help
+manoeuvre them. Raymond, who was supposed to have mingled in European
+society (instead of having viewed it from afar, in detachment), was
+asked to serve in this field.
+
+There were equally good opportunities for brisk, aggressive young men on
+finance committees and such-like bodies, wherein prominent sexagenarians
+did the heavily ornamental and allowed good scope for younger men who
+had begun to get a record and who wished to confirm ability in
+influential eyes. This opened a road for John W. McComas, who made a
+record, indeed, in the matter of gathering local subscriptions. He
+dented the consciousness of several important men in his own field, and
+got praised in the press for his indefatigability and his powers of
+persuasion. Before the six months of festivity were half over, our
+Johnny had become a "prominent citizen" and his new bank almost a
+household word.
+
+Raymond did less well. The great organization was an executive
+hierarchy: ranks and rows of officials, with due heed not only to
+coördination but to subordination. Some men do their best under such
+conditions; others, their worst. Raymond, a strong individualist, a
+pronounced egoist, could not "fall in." Even in his simple field--one
+concerned chiefly with but the outward flourishes--the big machine irked
+and embarrassed him. He withdrew. When an imperial prince was publicly
+"received," with ceremonies that mingled old-world formalities (however
+lamely followed) and local inspirations (however poorly disciplined),
+the moving event went off with no help of his: I believe he even smiled
+at it all from a balcony.
+
+It was here that Raymond began to make clear his true type. He was
+Goethe's "bad citizen"--the man who is unable to command and unwilling
+to obey.
+
+After a particularly flamboyant appreciation of McComas's services in a
+Sunday newspaper, I ventured to touch on our Johnny's rise in Raymond's
+hearing. The two had not met for years; and Johnny had probably no
+greater place in Raymond's mind than Raymond, as I remembered once
+finding, had in Johnny's. But Raymond did not yet pretend to overlook or
+to forget or to ignore him; nor did he yet allow himself to mention
+Johnny as a one-time dweller in his father's stable.
+
+"Why, yes," said Raymond; "he seems to be coming on fast. Climbing like
+anything."
+
+This, I felt, was disapproval, slightly tinctured with contempt. But
+there are two kinds of progress on a ladder or a stairway. There is the
+climbing up, and there is (as we sometimes let ourselves say) the
+climbing down.
+
+It was at the imperial reception that Raymond and Johnny finally met.
+Let us figure Raymond as descending from his satirical balcony, and
+Johnny, with his wife, as earnestly working his way up the great
+stairway--the _scalone_, as Italy had taught Raymond to call it. This
+was an ample affair with an elaborate handrail, whose function was
+nullified by potted plants, and with a commodious landing, whose corners
+contained many thickset palms. A crowd swarmed up; a crowd swarmed down;
+the hundreds were congested among the palms. Johnny, with his wife on
+his arm, was robust and hearty, and smiled on things in general as he
+fought their way up. He took the occasion as he took any other occasion:
+much for granted, but with a certain air of richly belonging and of
+worthily fitting in. His wife--"I suppose it was his wife," said
+Raymond--was elaborately gowned and in high feather: a successful
+delegate of luxury. Obviously an occasion of this sort was precisely
+what she had long been waiting for. Despite the press about her, she
+made her costume and her carriage tell for all they might. A triumphing
+couple, even Raymond was obliged to concede. The acme of team work....
+
+"There we were--stuck in the crowd," said Raymond, whose one desire
+seemed to have been to gain the street. "Not too close, fortunately. I
+had to bow, but I didn't have to speak; and I didn't have to be
+'presented.' He gave me quite a nod."
+
+And no great exercise of imagination was required for me to see how
+distant and reserved was Raymond's bow in return.
+
+
+IV
+
+That autumn, after the festal flags had ceased their flaunting and fire
+had made a wide sweep over the white palaces, Raymond suddenly went
+abroad. It was to be a stay of three or four months. He first wrote me
+from Paris.
+
+He wrote again in December, also from Paris, and told me _tout court_
+that he was engaged to be married. I give this news to you as suddenly
+as he gave it to me.
+
+You can supply motives as easily as I. His parents were gone and his
+family life was _nil_. The old house was large and lonely. You may
+believe him influenced, if you like, by his last view of Johnny McComas
+and by Johnny's amazing effect of completeness and content. You may
+fancy him as visited by compunctions and mortifications due to his
+consciousness of his own futility. Or you may fall back upon the simple
+and general promptings that are smoothly current in the minds of us all.
+My own notion, however, is this: he never would have married at home;
+only an insidious whiff of romance, encountered in France or Italy,
+could have accomplished his undoing.
+
+Raymond's own advices were meagre. "Your emotional participation not
+particularly desired"--such seemed to be the message that lay invisible
+between his few lines. But other correspondents supplied the _lacunæ_.
+He was to marry a girl whose family formed part of the American colony
+in the French capital. At least, the feminine members of the family were
+there: the mother, and an elder sister. The father, according to a
+custom that still provoked Gallic comment, was elsewhere: he was
+following the markets in America. The bride-to-be was between nineteen
+and twenty. Raymond himself was thirty-three.
+
+He advised me, later, that the wedding would take place at the end of
+February and requested me to obtain and forward some of the quaint
+documents demanded at such a juncture by the French authorities. He
+added that he hoped for a honeymoon in Italy, but that his fiancée
+favored Biarritz and Pau.
+
+The wedding came off at one of the American churches in Paris. It was a
+sumptuous ceremonial, aided by a bishop (who was on his travels, but who
+had not forgotten to bring along his vestments) and by the attendance of
+half the colony. Raymond was obliged to put up with all this pomp and
+show, much as it ran counter to his tastes and inclinations. But
+fortunately he was made even less of than most young men on such an
+occasion; he had few connections on either side of the water, so the
+bride's connections dominated the day and made her the chief figure
+still more completely than is commonly the case. And the honeymoon was
+spent, not in the north of Italy, but in the south of France.
+
+There are times when a young girl must have her way. And there are times
+when a young husband (but not so young) will determine to have his. I
+knew Raymond.
+
+The couple were in no haste to get home. The four months ran to almost a
+year. I first met the new wife at a reception in the early autumn.
+
+"Gertrude," said Raymond, "let me present to you my old friend--" H'm!
+let me see: what _is_ my name?--Oh, yes: "Gertrude, let me present to
+you my old friend, George Waite."
+
+Can a young bride, dressed in black, and dressed rather simply too, look
+almost wicked? Well, this one contrived to.
+
+The effect was not due to her face, which had an expression of naïve
+sophistication, or of sophisticated naïveté, not at all likely to
+mislead the mature; nor to her carriage, which, though slightly
+self-conscious, was modest enough, and not a bit too demure. It was due
+to her dress, which, after all, was not quite so simple, either in
+intention or in execution, as it seemed. It was black, and black only;
+and it was trimmed with black jet or spangles or passementerie or
+whatever--let some one else find the name. It was cut close, and it was
+cut low; too close and too low--she was the young married woman with a
+vengeance. It took a tone and bespoke a tradition to which most of us
+were as yet strangers, and our initiation into a new and equivocal realm
+had been too sudden for our powers of adjustment. It was Paris in its
+essence--the thing in itself--and it had all come unedited through the
+hands of a mother and a sister who were so rapt or so subservient as to
+be incapable of offering opposition to the full pungency of the Parisian
+evangel, and of hushing down an emphatic text for acceptance in a more
+quiet environment. I can only say that several nice young chaps looked
+once and then looked away. Raymond himself was inconvenienced. Nor did
+matters mend when, within a week or so, Mrs. Raymond Prince began to
+rate the women of her new circle as "homespun."
+
+Her little hand fell most heavily on these poor aborigines when two or
+three members of Raymond's singing-class loyally came to one of her own
+receptions. These Adeles and Gertrudes of the earlier day were now wives
+and mothers, with the interests proper to such. They had shepherded
+babies through croup and diphtheria, and were now seeing husky,
+wholesome boys and girls of twelve and thirteen through the primary
+schools. When among themselves, they talked of servants and husbands.
+They had not married and gone West or East; they had married at home,
+and they had stayed at home. They had had too many things on their hands
+and minds to catch up much of the recent exoticism stirring about them
+here in town, and they were far from able to cope with this recent
+importation of exoticism from the Rue de la Paix.
+
+Raymond came home, one afternoon, in time for the last half-hour of his
+wife's last reception. Her dress, on this occasion, was quite as daring,
+in its way, as on the other, and original to the point of the bizarre.
+One of the early Adeles was leaving, but she stopped for a moment and
+attempted speech. She was the particular Adele with the piercing soprano
+voice--a voice which had since lowered itself to sing lullabies to three
+successive infants.
+
+"Well, Raymond--" she began hopefully, and stopped. She tried again, but
+failed; and she passed on and out with her words unsaid.
+
+"Well, Raymond--" Yes, I am afraid that that was the impression of more
+early friends than one.
+
+
+V
+
+Raymond had expected, of course, to give his wife her own way at the
+beginning--at the very beginning, that is; and he had expected, equally,
+to have her make a definite impression on the circle awaiting her. But--
+
+Well, he had intended to "take her in hand," and to do it soon. She was
+to be formed, or re-formed; she was to be adjusted, both to things in
+general and to himself especially. Besides being her husband, he was to
+be her kindly elder brother, her monitor, patient but firm; she was to
+enter upon a state of tutelage. He was pretty certain to be right in all
+his views, opinions and practices; and she, if her views, opinions and
+practices were at variance with his, was pretty certain to be in the
+wrong. He assumed that, during those few years in Paris, she had learned
+it all in one big lesson only. The time had been too short to confirm
+all this sudden instruction into a reasoned and assimilated way of life;
+by no means had that superficial miscellany been rubbed into the warp
+and woof of her being. The Parisian top-dressing would be removed and
+the essential subsoil be exposed and tilled....
+
+H'm!
+
+One of the strongest of her early impressions was naturally that of the
+house in which she was to live. It was big and roomy; it was detached,
+and thus open to light and air. But its elephantine woodwork repelled
+her, for she had grown up amid the rococo exuberances of Paris
+apartments. The heavy honesty of black-walnut depressed her after the
+gilded stucco of her mother's salon. And that huge, portentous
+orchestrion took up such an immensity of room!
+
+I doubt if the neighborhood itself pleased her much better, though it
+was homogeneous (in its way), and dignified, and enjoyed an exceptional
+measure of quietude. Perhaps it was too quiet, after some years of a
+balcony on a boulevard. And it is true that some of the big houses were
+vacant, and that some of the families roundabout went away too often and
+stayed away too long. An empty house is a dead house, and when doors and
+windows are boarded up you may say the dead house is laid out. Things
+were sometimes _triste_--the French for final condemnation. The exodus
+so long foreshadowed seemed appreciably under way. This Gertrude became
+increasingly conscious, as the months went on, that most of the people
+she wanted to see and most of the houses she was prompted to frequent
+were miles away, and that the flood-tide of business rolled between.
+
+Of her reaction to the circle in which she first found herself I have
+given you one or two indications. It would be easy, as it would be
+customary, to give some other of her early social experiences in detail
+and her reactions to them; but my interest is frankly in her husband and
+in his reactions. It was of him, too, that I saw the most; and I have
+never gone greatly into society.
+
+At the end of a long and possibly somewhat dull winter his wife began to
+hint the advantageousness of transferring themselves to that other part
+of town. Raymond was not precisely in the position where he cared to pay
+high rent for a small house, while a big house was standing empty and
+unrealizable. Pouts; frowns.... But nature came to his aid. With a new
+young life soon to appear above the horizon, now was no time to shift.
+His son should be born in the house in which he ought to be born. A
+reasonable view, on the whole; and it prevailed.
+
+Raymond had said "son," and son it was. The baby was not named Raymond:
+his father, however much of an egoist, was not willing to put himself
+forward as such so obviously, nor for a period that promised to be
+indefinitely long. Nor was the baby called Bartholomew, after his
+maternal grandfather in the East: for who cared to inflict such an
+old-fashioned, four-syllable name on such a small morsel of flesh? He
+entered the battle under the neutral and not over-colorful pennon of
+Albert: his mother could thus call him "Bertie," and think, not too
+remotely, of her parent on the stock exchange.
+
+Raymond was not long in discovering, after reaching home, what
+sacrifices the new life was to involve. On the Continent, in the midst
+of change and stir, these had not foretold themselves. Back in his own
+house, his interests--"intellectual interests" he called them--began to
+assert themselves in the old way. But he was no longer free to range the
+fields of the mind and take shots at the arts as they rose. Least of all
+was he to read in the evening. That was to neglect, to affront. However,
+the arrival of little Albert--poor tad!--changed the current of his
+wife's own interests and helped to place one more rather vital matter
+in abeyance. He was to live--for a while, anyway--in his present home;
+and he was to pursue--for a while, anyway--some of the accustomed
+interests of his bachelor days. He expected that, before long, his wife
+would accept his environment and the practices he had always followed
+within it. She needed enlightenment on many points. He had already
+communicated some of his views on dress, for example; and he had
+readjusted her notions on the preparation of salads. He gave her, pretty
+constantly, corrective glances through, or over, his eyeglasses,--for
+his sight had begun to weaken early, as his father had foreseen,--and he
+meant that such glances should count. She required to be edited; well,
+the new manuscript was worth his pains, and would be highly creditable
+in its revised version.
+
+
+VI
+
+If one advantage showed forth from a situation that seemed, in general,
+not altogether promising, it was this: Raymond, hearing his native town
+commented upon unfavorably by his wife,--who was keen and constant in
+her criticisms,--began to defend it. It was one thing for the
+native-born to pick flaws; it was another when that ungracious work was
+attempted by a newcomer. And he meant not only to defend it, but to
+remain in it, though his wife had married him partly on the strength of
+his European predilections, and largely on the assumption that a good
+part of their married life would be spent abroad. He even began to
+wonder if he might not join in and help improve things. Like most of his
+fellow-townsmen, he regarded the city's participation in the late
+national festival as a great step in advance,--the first of many like
+steps soon to follow. The day after the Fair was late; but better to be
+late than never. Really, there was hope for the Big Black Botch. More
+and more he felt inclined to lessen still further its lessening
+enormity. After all, this town was the town of his birth: and a
+fundamental egoism cried out that it should be more worthy of him. He
+recalled a group of American women--Easterners--whom, during his first
+trip abroad, he had caught poring over the guest-book of a hotel in
+Sorrento. He was the last male arrival in a slow season; he seemed
+interesting and promising; evidently they had had hopes. "But," asked
+one of them, "how is it you are willing to register openly from such a
+town as that?"--and Raymond had felt the sting. "Such nerve, such
+bumptiousness!" he said to me in recalling that query some years later.
+But he did not add that he had tried to deliver any _riposte_. Instead
+he was now to make a belated return at home, where effort most counted.
+The years immediately to come were to be full of new openings and
+opportunities; in his own way, and under his peculiar handicaps, he was
+to try to take some advantage of them.
+
+
+
+
+PART V
+
+I
+
+
+Little Albert's babyhood kept his mother a good deal at home--and by
+"home" I mean the house in which he had been born. His father's lessened
+interest in Europe (and his diminished deference for it) kept his mother
+at home completely--and by "home" I now mean the town in which Albert
+had been born. Father, mother, and offspring filled the big house as
+well as they could--the big, _old_ house as it was sometimes called by
+those who cherished a chronology that was purely American; and Albert
+was more than a year and a half along in life before his grandmother
+came across to see him and to inspect the distant _ménage_. She brought
+her water-waves and her sharpened critical sense, and went back leaving
+the impression that she was artificial and exacting.
+
+"She missed her Paris," said Raymond, "and her drive in the Bois."
+
+"H'm!" said I, recalling that the town's recent chief executive had
+pronounced us, not many years back, the equal of Paris in civic beauty.
+
+"We have no Bois, as yet," he added, thoughtfully. "Do you think we ever
+shall have one?"
+
+He was revolving the Bois, not as a definite tract of park land, but as
+a social institution.
+
+"I think," said I, "that we had better be satisfied with developing
+according to our own nature and needs."
+
+"Yes," he returned; "there was the Frenchman at the fox-hunt: 'No band,
+no promenade, no nossing.' Well, we must go on our own tack, as soon as
+we discover it."
+
+It need not be imagined that his mother-in-law's look-in of a month made
+his wife more contented. She kept on wishing for her new friends in
+another quarter, and (more strongly) for the familiar scenes of the
+other side. Raymond did not wish the expense involved in either move.
+His affairs were now going but tolerably. So far as the bank was
+concerned--a bank that had once been almost a "family" institution--his
+influence was naught. He was only a stockholder, and a smaller
+stockholder than once. His interest, in any sense, was but a brief,
+periodical interest in dividends. These were coming with a commendable
+regularity still. His rentals came in fairly too; but most of them were
+now derived from properties on the edge of the business
+district--properties with no special future and likely only to hold
+their own however favorable general conditions might continue. Travel?
+No. A man travels best in his youth, when he is foot-free, care-free,
+fancy-free. Go traveling too late, or once too often, and there is a
+difference. The final checking-off of something one has "always meant to
+see" may result in the most ashen disappointment of all: even intuition,
+without the pains of actual experience, should suffice to warn. Besides,
+as Raymond said,--
+
+"We've both had a good deal of it. Let's stay at home."
+
+His wife cast about her. There is a mood in which a deprivation of high
+comedy may drive one to low-down farce. To-day people are even going
+farther. A worthy stage is dead, they say; and they patronize, somewhat
+willfully and contemptuously (or with a loose, slack tolerance that is
+worse), the moving pictures. Perhaps it was in some such mood that
+Raymond's wife took up with Mrs. Johnny McComas. They were but three
+streets apart. Mrs. McComas was lively, energetic, determined to drive
+on; and her ability to assimilate rapidly and light-handedly her growing
+opulence made it seem by no means a mere vulgar external adornment. She
+knew how to move among the remarkable furnishings with which she had
+surrounded herself in that old-new house, and how to make the momentum
+gained there serve her ends in the world outside.
+
+"It will be a short life here," her husband had told her on their taking
+possession; "then, a quick sale--at a good figure--to some manufacturing
+concern, and on we go."
+
+"If it's to be short, let's make it merry," she had rejoined; and
+nothing had been spared that could give liveliness to their stately old
+interiors, while those interiors lasted.
+
+Mrs. Raymond Prince vaguely pronounced their house "amusing." It had,
+like Adele McComas herself, a provocative dash which fell in with her
+present mood, and it pleased her that its châtelaine was inclined to
+dress up to its wayward sofas and hangings. She even went with Mrs.
+Johnny on shopping tours and abetted her as her fancies, desires and
+expenditures ran riot. It was a mood of irresponsibility--almost of
+defiant irresponsibility.
+
+Now was the nascent day of the country club. Several of these welcome
+institutions had lately set themselves up in a modest, tentative way.
+Acceptance was complete, and all they had to do was to grow. With one of
+these McComas cast his lot. At the start it was a simple enough affair;
+but Johnny must have sensed its potentialities and savored its
+affinities, its coming congruity with himself. It was to become,
+shortly, a club for the suddenly, violently rich, the flushed with
+dollars, the congested with prosperity--for newcomers who had met
+Success and beaten her at her own game. Stir on all hands, the reek of
+sudden felicity in the air. In later years people with access to better
+things of similar sort were known to become indignant when asked to
+associate themselves with it. "Why should _I_ want to join _that_?" was
+the question they put. But it pleased Johnny McComas, both by its
+present manifestations and its latent possibilities. It was richly in
+unison with his own nature, and I believe he had a ravishing vision of
+its magnificent futurities.
+
+Last year my wife and I were taken to a Sunday afternoon concert out
+there. We found a place of towers and arcades, of endless corridors
+planted with columns and numberless chairs in numberless varieties, of
+fountained courts, of ball-rooms, of concert-halls, of gay apparel and
+cool drinks. We heard of fairs, horse-shows, tournaments in golf and
+tennis. The restaurant, with its acre of tables, glassed and naperied;
+the ranges of telephone booths, all going it together; the cellars, a
+vast subterrene, with dusky avenues of lockers, each cluttered with
+beverages of individual predilection--though I suppose that, after all,
+they were a good deal alike....
+
+Well, it was too much for us; and my Elsie, who is essentially the lady,
+if woman ever was, came away feeling a little dowdy and a good deal out
+of date.
+
+At that earlier period, however, it was still simple; the germ was
+there, but the development of its possibilities had only begun. When
+Mrs. McComas invited Mrs. Prince to drive out with her and see some
+tennis, Mrs. Prince was quite ready to accept.
+
+I do not know just what mode of locomotion they employed. It was in the
+early days of the automobile and Johnny McComas was one of the first men
+in town to have one. I recall, in fact, some of his initial experiences
+with it. On a Sunday afternoon I encountered him in one of these still
+relatively unstudied contraptions on a frequented driveway. Another man
+was sitting beside him patiently. The conveyance was making no progress
+at all. Fortunately it had stopped close enough to the curb not to
+interfere with the progress of other and more familiar equipages.
+
+"We're stuck," said Johnny, jovially, as he caught sight of me. "Ran for
+three or four miles slick as a whistle--and look at us now!" It
+entertained him--a kink in a new toy. And he enjoyed the interest of the
+people collected about.
+
+"You're gummed up, I expect," said I. In those days nobody knew much
+about the new creature and its habits, and one man's guess was as good
+as another's. Two or three bystanders eyed me deferentially, as a
+probable expert.
+
+"Likely enough," he agreed--and that made me an expert beyond doubt.
+"But this will do for to-day. We've been here twenty minutes."
+
+He had the car pushed to a near-by stable, amidst the mixed emotions of
+the little crowd, and next day he had it hauled home.
+
+"You were right," he said, when I met him out again in it, a week later.
+"It _was_ gummed up, so to speak; but it's working like a charm to-day.
+Get in and I'll take you a few miles. That other fellow got an awful
+grouch."
+
+It may have been by this machine, or by some more familiar mode of
+locomotion, that the two women reached the country club and its tennis
+tournament. Gertrude Prince strolled through its grounds and galleries
+with the aloof and amused air of one touring through a foreign town--a
+town never seen before and likely to be left behind altogether within an
+hour or two. It was at once semi-smart and semi-simple. She took it
+lightly, even condescendingly; and when Johnny McComas himself appeared
+somewhat later and set them down at a little marble table near a
+fountain-jet and offered cocktails as a preliminary to a variety of
+sandwiches, she decided, after looking about and seeing a few other
+ladies with glasses before them on other little marble tables, to
+accept. It was a lark in some town of the provinces--Meaux or Melun;
+what difference did it make?
+
+They formed a little group altogether to Johnny's liking. His wife was
+dressed dashingly; his wife's guest made a very fair second; he
+himself, although he never lifted a racquet, was in the tennis garb of
+that day.
+
+"You both look ripping," he declared with hearty satisfaction. To look
+thus, before competing items in the throng, was the object of the place,
+the reason for its developing _mise en scène_.
+
+Johnny himself looked ripping--cool, confident, content, and at the top
+of his days.
+
+"It was amusing...." said Gertrude to me, with an upward inflection, a
+week later.
+
+And she asked me for more about Johnny McComas.
+
+
+II
+
+If those were days when people began to combine for the pursuit of
+pleasure, they were also days when people began to gather at the call of
+public duty. If clubs were forming on the borders, other clubs, leagues,
+societies were forming nearer the centre--organizations to make
+effective the scattered good-will of the well-disposed and to gain some
+betterment in the local political life. To initiate and conduct such
+movements only a few were needed; but the many were expected to
+contribute, if not their zeal and their time, at least their dollars. It
+was patriotic righteousness made easy: a man had only to give his fifty
+dollars or his five hundred to feel, without further personal exertion,
+that he was a good citizen and was forwarding, as all good citizens
+should, a worthy cause. This way of doing it fell in wonderfully well
+with Raymond's temperament and abilities (or lack of them): the
+liberality of his contributions did not remain unknown, and he was
+sometimes held up as a favorable specimen of the American citizen.
+
+Another movement was soon to engage his attention. If the prosperous
+were to have their playgrounds beyond the city's outskirts, the less
+prosperous should have theirs within the city's limits. The scheme of a
+system of small parks and playgrounds quite took Raymond's fancy. It
+contained, besides the idea of social amelioration, the even more
+grateful idea of municipal beautification. In time, indeed, might not
+this same notion, fortified by experience and given a wider
+application, end by redeeming the town not merely in spots but in its
+entirety?--a saved and graced whole, not only as to its heart, but as to
+its liberal and varied borders of water, woodland and prairie.
+
+"I should be proud of that," said Raymond heartily. The name of such a
+city, following one's own name on any hotel-register, would indeed be a
+matter for pride.
+
+He attended several of the early meetings that were designed to get some
+such project, in its simpler form, under way. He had friends among
+professional men in the arts, and some acquaintances among newly formed
+bodies of social workers. He was not slow in perceiving that the way was
+likely to be tedious and hard. It called for organization--the
+organization of hope, of patience, of hot, untiring zeal, of _finesse_
+against political chicane, of persistence in the face of indifference
+and selfishness. "It will take years of organized endeavor," he
+confessed. He recognized his own ineffectiveness beyond the narrow pale
+of hopeful suggestion, and wished that here too the giving of a
+substantial sum--a large penny-in-the-slot--might produce quick and
+facile results.
+
+His wife, it is to be feared, looked upon these activities of his,
+however slight, with a lack-lustre eye. She knew nothing of local
+problems and local needs. She was conscious of a hortatory manner in
+small matters and of indifference, which she almost made neglect, in
+matters that appeared to her to be larger. If she asked for a fairer
+share in his evenings--he belonged to a literary club, a musical
+society, and so on--it was scant consolation to be told that he objected
+to some of her own activities and associations. He did not much care,
+for example, to have her "run" with the McComases and others of that
+type or to have her dawdle over glasses, tall, broad, or short, in
+places of general democratic assemblage; and he told her so. I believe
+it was about here that she began to find him something of a prig and a
+doctrinaire; and she was not incapable, under provocation, of mentioning
+her impressions. It was about here, I suspect, that he told her
+something of Johnny McComas and his origins--at least he once or twice
+spoke of Johnny with a certain sharp scorn to me. He assuredly spoke of
+other country clubs on the other side of town which were more desirable
+for her and equally accessible, save in the material sense of mere
+miles. Though he took no interest in athletics, nor even in the lighter
+out-of-door sports, he was willing to join one of those clubs, if it was
+required of him.
+
+His reference to Johnny McComas was designed, no doubt, to repel her;
+but the effect, as became perfectly apparent, was quite the contrary.
+She was interested, even fascinated, by the rise of a man from so little
+to so much. She found words and words to express her admiration of
+Johnny's type, and when English words ran short she found words in
+French. He was _gaillard_; he had _élan_. What wasn't he? What hadn't
+he? Bits of bravado, I still incline to think.
+
+No, the McComases were not to be left behind all of a sudden. One day
+she made another excursion to the outskirts with them; and she reported
+it to Raymond, with a little air of suppressed mockery, as a perfectly
+unobjectionable jaunt. She had gone with them to the cemetery. Johnny's
+mother had died the year before, and he had been putting up a monument
+in Roselands. This structure, it developed, was no mere memorial to an
+individual. It was a tall shaft, set in the middle of a large lot. I saw
+it later myself: a lavish erection (with all its accessory features
+taken into account)--one designed, as I felt, to show Johnny himself to
+posterity as an ancestor, as the founder of a family line. Assuredly his
+own name, aside from the tall obelisk itself, was the largest thing in
+view.
+
+Raymond took this account of Johnny's latest phase with an admirable
+seriousness; he thought the better of him for it. He himself was
+inclined to divide human-kind into two classes, those who had
+cemetery-lots (with monuments), and those who had not. The latter, of
+course, are in a majority everywhere. One thinks of Naples and of the
+sad road that winds up past the Alhambra to--Well, yes; in a majority,
+of course; and inevitably so in a large town suddenly thrown together
+by a heaping up of fortuitous and miscellaneous elements. In later
+years, when things were going rather badly with Raymond, and when
+consideration seemed to fail, he could always comfort himself with
+thoughts of the Princes' own monument in that same cemetery. This was
+another tall shaft in a gray granite now no longer to be found, and had
+been set up by old Jehiel on the occasion of the reinterment of some
+infants by his first wife--a transaction carried out years before
+Raymond was born. Some of the dates on the base of the monument went
+back to the early thirties. Well, there it stood, with the subordinated
+headstones of Jehiel and old Beulah, of his own parents, and of the
+half-mythical babes who, if they had given nothing else to the world,
+had furnished a future nephew with a social perspective. Raymond,
+reconsidering Johnny's recent effort, now began to disparage that
+improvised background, and led his wife to view his own lot--theirs,
+hers--only a hundred yards from the other. But she could not respond to
+old Jehiel and Beulah--though she tried to be properly sympathetic over
+their son and his wife. Still less could she vitalize the infants who
+had encountered an epidemic on the prairie frontier and had succumbed
+more than three score years ago. If she thought of any child at all, she
+thought doubtless of little Albert (now romping about in his first tweed
+knickerbockers), who would not die for many years, perhaps, and who was
+like enough to be buried in quite another spot.
+
+But I think she thought, most of all, of the manly, cheerful sorrow of
+Johnny McComas before the new monument in the other lot.
+
+
+III
+
+These were also days of panic. Banks went down and bank officials threw
+themselves after. The city was thrilled, even charmed, to find that its
+financial perturbations touched, however slightly, the nerves of London
+and Paris. I myself was in Algeria that winter: my Elsie and I had
+decided on three months along the Mediterranean. It was on the white,
+glaring walls of the casino at Biskra that the news was first bulletined
+for our eyes. It had a glare of its own, I assure you: for a few days
+we knew little enough how we ourselves might be standing.
+
+I thought of the Mid-Continent, with its cumbersome counters and
+partitions done in walnut veneer and its old-fashioned pavement in
+squares of black and white. I thought too of Johnny McComas's new
+institution, with so many bright brass handrails and such a spread of
+tasteful mosaics underfoot. How had they fared? Well, they had fared
+quite differently. Why should a big, old bank go under, while a new,
+little bank continues to float. I cannot tell you. I was far away at the
+time. Perhaps I could not tell you even if I had been on the spot. And
+to other questions, more important still, I may be unable to give, when
+the pinch comes, a clearer answer. The Mid-Continent dashed, or drifted,
+into the rocky hands of a receiver; and McComas's bank, after a
+fortnight of wobbling, righted itself and kept on its way.
+
+I saw Raymond again in March. The receivership was going on languidly.
+Prospects were bright for nobody.
+
+"All this puts an end to _one_ of my plans, anyhow," he said.
+
+"What plan is that?" I asked.
+
+I was reminded that these were also the days of a quickened interest in
+education. This interest was expressing itself in large new
+institutions, and these institutions were generously embodying
+themselves in solid stone--in mullions, groins, gargoyles, finials, and
+the whole volume of approved scholastic detail. Donors were grouping
+themselves in "halls" and dormitories round a certain inchoate campus,
+and were putting on the fronts of their buildings their own names, or
+the names of deceased husbands or wives, fathers or mothers--so many
+bids for a monumental immortality.
+
+"I had hoped for a Prince Hall," said Raymond. And he explained that it
+would have been in memory of his parents.
+
+I must pause for a moment on this matter. I do not believe that Raymond
+had ever thought, in seriousness, of any such gift. It must have been at
+best an errant fancy, and if concerned with commemorating anybody
+concerned with commemorating himself. But I will say this for him: he
+never was disposed to try getting things out of people, for he hated
+attempts at trickery almost as much as he detested the exercise of the
+shrewdness involved in bargaining and dickering. Per contra, he often
+showed himself not averse to giving things to other people; but the
+basis for that giving must be clearly understood all round. He would not
+compete; he would not struggle; he would not descend to a war of wits.
+His to bestow, from some serene height; his the rôle, in fact, of the
+kindly patron. Let but his own superiority be recognized--let him only
+be regarded as _hors concours_--and he would sometimes deign to do the
+most generous acts. These acts embraced, now and again, the
+entertainment of writers and artists, either at his home or elsewhere:
+his fellows--for he was a writer and an artist too. But it was all done
+with the understanding that there was a difference: he was a writer and
+an artist--but he was something more. Those who failed to feel the
+difference were not always bidden a second time.
+
+And his fancy for patronage was developing just at a time when patronage
+was becoming more difficult, awkward, impracticable! But though "Prince
+Hall" never saw the light, other and humbler forms of patronage came to
+be accepted by him.
+
+Toward the end of April Raymond and his wife joined one of the clubs
+which he had brought to her notice. Though in a formative stage, like
+others, it was good (we ourselves joined it some few years later); and
+she made it her concern, through the summer, to give it some of those
+shaping pats which--for a new club, as for a new vase--have the greater
+value the earlier they are bestowed. She was active about the place, and
+she became conspicuous.
+
+It was soon seen that she was "gay"--or was inclined to be, under
+favoring conditions. The conditions were most favoring, it began to be
+felt, when her husband was not about. A good many thought him stiff, and
+a few who used obsolete dictionary words pronounced him proud--a term
+stately enough to constitute somehow a tribute, though a damnatory one.
+It was soon seen, too, that just as he irked her, so she disparaged
+him--an open road to others.
+
+One day she gave a lunch at the club--places for a dozen. Johnny McComas
+appeared there for the first time. It was a plainer place than his own,
+but I credit him with perceiving that it was much more worth while.
+Adele McComas did not appear--for a good reason. Those obstreperous
+twins now had a little sister two weeks old. The wife was doubtless
+better at home, but was the husband better at the club? If I had been a
+member at that time, and present, I should have felt like following him
+to some corner of the veranda and saying: "Oh, come, now, Johnny, will
+this quite do?" Well, I know what his look would have been--it came
+later. He would have turned that wide, round face on me, with the curly
+hair about the temples which gave him somehow an expression of abiding
+youth and frankness; and he would have directed those hard, bright blue
+eyes of his to look straight ahead at me--eyes that seemed to hold back
+nothing, yet really told nothing at all; and would have disclaimed any
+wrong-doing or any intention of wrong-doing. And I should have felt
+myself a foolish meddler.
+
+Well, the innocent informalities of the summer were resumed by the same
+set in town next winter. The memories and the methods of one season were
+tided over to another. Gertrude was still "gay"--perhaps gayer--and a
+little more openly impatient with her husband, and a little more openly
+disdainful of him. Young men swarmed and fluttered, and those who had
+"never tried it on" before seemed inclined to try it on now.
+
+I take, on the whole, a tempered view--by which I mean, a favorable
+view--of our society and its moral tone. I am assured, and I believe
+from my own observations, that this is higher than in some other of our
+large cities. I dislike scandal, and I have no desire to bear tales.
+Either is far from being the object of these present pages. Nothing that
+I present need be taken as typical, as tyrannously representative.
+
+Raymond criticized, expostulated. Friends began to come to him with
+impressions and reports. I--whether for good or ill--was not one of
+these. They named names--names which I shall not record here. But it was
+one of Raymond's own impressions, and a vivid one, which finally
+prompted him to make a move.
+
+
+IV
+
+January found the social life of the town in full swing. We had
+recovered from last year's financial jolt, and entertaining was
+constant. Raymond and his wife were invited out a good deal. He was
+bored by it all; but his wife remained interested and indefatigable.
+Finally came a dance at one of the great houses. Raymond rebelled, and
+refused point-blank to go: an evening in his library was his mood. His
+wife protested, cajoled, and he finally found a reason for giving in.
+
+As I say, they were bidden to one of the great houses--one of the few
+that possessed an actual façade, a central court, and a big staircase:
+it had too its galleries of paintings and of Oriental curios before
+Oriental curios became too common. Its owner was also, with the rest, a
+musical amateur. He was a man of forty-five, and like Raymond had a wife
+too many years younger than himself for his own comfort. This lively
+lady lived on fiddles and horns--dancing was an inexhaustible pleasure.
+At her dancing-parties, of which she gave three or four a season, her
+husband would show himself below for a few moments for civility's sake,
+and then retire to a remote den on an upper floor, well shut out from
+the sounds of his wife's frivolous measures, but accessible to a few
+habitués of age and tastes approximating his own.
+
+The question of music of another quality and to another purpose was in
+the air--it was a matter of endowing and housing an orchestra. Informal
+_pour-parlers_ were under way in various quarters, and Raymond felt
+disposed, and even able, to contribute in a modest measure. It was his
+pride to have been asked, and it was his pride, despite untoward
+conditions, to put up a good front and do as much as he could. An hour's
+confab over cigarettes in that retired little den might clarify one
+atmosphere, if not another.
+
+The court and its staircase were set with palms, as is the ineluctable
+wont on such occasions and for such places; and people, between the
+dances, or during them, were brushing the fronds aside as they thronged
+the galleries round the court to see the Barbizon masters then in vogue
+and the Chinese jades. As Raymond passed down the stairway, he met his
+wife coming up on the arm of Johnny McComas.
+
+"She looked self-conscious," Raymond said to me, a few days after. I
+told him that he had seen only what he was expecting to see.
+
+"And he looked too beastly self-satisfied." I told him that of late I
+had seldom seen Johnny look any other way.
+
+"Where was his wife?" he asked. I told him she might easily be in the
+crowd on some other man's arm.
+
+"Why were they there at all?" he demanded. And I did not tell him that
+probably they were there through his own wife's good offices.
+
+That meeting on the stairs!--he made a grievance of it, an injury. The
+earlier meeting, with Johnny's own wife on his arm, had annoyed him as a
+general assertion of prosperity. This present meeting, with Raymond
+Prince's wife on Johnny's arm, exasperated him as a challenging
+assertion of power and predominance.
+
+"I shall act," Raymond declared.
+
+"Nothing rash," said I. "Nothing unconsidered, I hope."
+
+"I shall act," he repeated. And he set his jaw more decisively than a
+strong man always finds necessary.
+
+
+V
+
+Raymond's mind was turning more and more to a set scene with McComas;
+some meeting between them was, to his notion, a _scène à faire_. It
+seemed demanded by a Gallic sense of form: it must be gone through with
+as a requisite to his rôle of offended husband.
+
+One difficulty was that Raymond fluctuated daily, almost hourly, in his
+view of his wife--of _the_ wife, I may say. To-day he took the old
+view: the wife was her husband's property and any attempt on her was a
+deadly injury to him. To-morrow he took the newer view: the wife was an
+individual human being and a free moral agent; therefore a lapse, while
+it meant disgrace for her, was, for him, but an affront which he must
+endure with dignified composure.
+
+Meanwhile the pair saw little of each other, and Albert, puzzled, began
+to enter upon his opportunity (a wide and lingering one it became) for
+learning adjustment to awkward and disconcerting conditions.
+
+Well, Raymond had his meeting. Imagine whether it was agreeable. Imagine
+whether it was agreeable to me, in whose office it was held. Raymond had
+the difficult part of one who must act because he has deliberately
+committed himself to action, yet has no sure ground to act upon, and
+therefore no line to take with real effect. It was here and now that
+McComas turned his round face foursquare to his uncertain accuser, and
+let loose a steady, unspeaking stare from those hard blue eyes, and
+declared that nothing had occurred upon which an accusation could justly
+be based. He was emphatic; and he was blunt; the son and grandson of a
+rustic.
+
+Nothing, he said. Had there really been nothing? You are entitled to
+ask. And I might be inclined to answer, if I knew. I simply don't. I was
+in position to know something, to know much; but everything?--no.
+
+Think, if you please, of the many domestic situations which must pass
+without the full light of detailed knowledge--knowledge that comes too
+late, or never comes at all. Consider the simple, willful girl who
+marries impulsively on the assumption that the new acquaintance is a
+bachelor. Cases have been known where it developed that he was not.
+Consider the phrase of the marriage service, "if any of you know just
+cause or impediment": who can declare that, in a given instance, some
+impediment, moral if not legal, might not be brought against either
+contracting party, however trustful the other? Consider the story of the
+anxious American mother who, alarmed by reports about a fascinating
+scoundrel under whom her daughter was studying music somewhere in
+mid-Europe, went abroad alone to investigate. Her letter to the awaiting
+father, back home, ran for page after page on non-essentials and dealt
+with the real point only in a brief, embarrassed, bewildered postscript
+of one line: "Oh, William, _I don't know_!" Neither do I "know." But my
+account of later events may help you to decide the question for
+yourselves.
+
+Raymond had set his mind on a divorce. If grounds could not be found in
+one quarter, they must be found in another. If McComas, that prime
+figure, was unable to bring aid, then there must be coöperation among
+the other and lesser figures. Raymond revived and reviewed the tales
+that had involved several younger men. The more he dwelt on them, the
+more inflamed he became, and the more certain that he had been wronged.
+
+I did not accompany him through his proceedings--such advice as I had
+given him near the beginning was the advice simply of a friend. My own
+part of the great field of the law is a relatively unimpassioned
+one--office-work involving real-estate, conveyancing, loans, and the
+like. I suggested to Raymond the proper counsel for the particular case,
+and there, for a while, I left him.
+
+His wife's parents came on from the East. The mother, after some years
+abroad, had lately resumed her domestic duties in the land of her birth.
+The father, who knew all of one subject, and nothing of any other,
+detached himself for a week or two from the one worthy interest in life
+and accompanied her. The "street" was still there when he returned. They
+seemed experienced and worldly-wise in their respective fields and their
+respective aspects, but they entered upon this new matter with a poor
+grace. Here was another mother who did not quite "know," and another
+father who waited, at a second remove, for definite knowledge that did
+not quite come. First there were maladroit attempts to bring a
+reconciliation; and afterwards, and more shrewdly, endeavors to gain as
+much as possible for their daughter from the wreck.
+
+Raymond was determined to keep possession of Albert. Mrs. McComas,
+mother of three, stoutly declared that the mother should have her child.
+Other women said the same, and maintained the point regardless of the
+mother's course or conduct. Many women have said the same in many cases,
+and perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are completely right in the
+case of a boy of six, who surely needs a woman's care. But it is not
+difficult, even when material is more abundant than definite, to throw
+an atmosphere of dubiousness about a woman and to make it appear that
+she is not a "proper person...." So it appeared to the judge in this
+case, and so he ruled--with a shading, however. Albert might spend with
+his mother one month every summer--and some financial concession on
+Raymond's part helped make the time brief. However, she was to have
+nothing to say about Albert's mode of life through the rest of the year,
+and nothing (more specifically) about his education.
+
+"That makes him mine," said Raymond.
+
+And he set his lips firmly. He was one of those who set their lips
+firmly after the event is determined.
+
+I do not know whether Raymond had any real affection for Albert. I do
+not know whether he realized what it was for a father to undertake,
+single handed, the charge of a boy of six. I think that what moved him
+chiefly was his determination to carry a point. However all this may be,
+I remember what he said as, after the decree, he walked out with
+Albert's hand in his.
+
+"Well, it's over!"
+
+Over!--as if a separation involving a child is ever "over"!
+
+
+
+
+PART VI
+
+I
+
+
+His domestic difficulty left behind, Raymond settled down to a
+middle-aged life of dignity and leisure--or attempted to. But the trial
+had rather shaken the dignity, and the sole control of Albert ate into
+the leisure. There followed, naturally, a period of restlessness and
+discontent.
+
+Those who imputed no blame to Raymond still felt it unfortunate, even
+calamitous, that he should not have learned how to get on with a young
+wife. But there were those that did blame him--blamed him for an
+unbending, self-satisfied prig who would have driven almost any spirited
+young woman to desperation. These disparaged him; sometimes--not always
+covertly--they ridiculed him. That hurt not only his dignity, but his
+pride.
+
+Some of you have perhaps been looking for a generalized expression of
+general ideas--for some observations on marriage and divorce which
+should have the detachable and quotable quality of epigram. Yet suppose
+I were to observe, just here, that Marriage makes a promise to the ear
+and breaks it to the hope; or that Divorce is the martyr's crown after
+the tortures of Incompatibility; or that Marriage is the Inferno, the
+Divorce-Court the Purgatory, and Divorce itself the Paradiso of human
+life? You would not be likely to think the better of me, and I should
+certainly think less well of myself. Though I am conscious of a homespun
+quality of thought and diction, I must keep within the limits set me by
+nature, eschewing "brilliancy" and continuing to deal not in abstract
+considerations but in concrete facts.
+
+Little Albert spent a good part of his time in a condition of
+bewilderment; he perceived early that he must not ask questions, that he
+must not try to understand. At intervals he ran noisily through the big
+house and made it seem emptier than ever. A nurse, or governess, or
+attendant of some special qualifications was required--even for the
+short time before he should begin his month with his mother, who was
+spending some months with her parents in the East. Even the
+preliminaries for this small event occasioned considerable thought and
+provoked a reluctant correspondence. His mother--prompted probably by
+her own mother--wrote on the subject of Albert's summer clothes. She
+wished to buy most of them herself. The Eastern climate in summer had
+its special points; also local usage in children's costuming must be
+considered--in detailed appearance her child must conform measurably to
+that particular juvenile society in which he was to appear. Then there
+was the nurse, or governess. Should Albert be brought on by her? And
+should she, once in the East, remain there to take him back; or...?
+
+"Oh, the devil!" cried Raymond, in his library, as he turned page after
+page of diffuse discourse. "How long is she going to run on? How many
+more things is she going to think of?"
+
+And she had felt impelled to address him, despite the cool tone of her
+letter, as "Dear Raymond." And that seemed to put him under the
+compulsion of addressing her, in turn, as "Dear Gertrude"! Truly, modes
+of address were scanty, inadequate.
+
+Well, Albert went East (wearing some of the disesteemed things he
+already possessed) to be outfitted for the summer shores of New Jersey.
+His governess took him as far as Philadelphia, where the Eastern
+connection met him, and "poored" him, sent the woman back home, and took
+him out on the shining sands. During the child's absence she made covers
+for the drawing-room sofas and chairs; the house, bereft of Albert and
+draped in pale Holland, became more dismal than ever.
+
+Raymond, now left alone, was free to devise a way of life in single
+harness. He liked it quite as well as the other way. He told himself,
+and he told me, that he liked it even better. I believe he did; and I
+believe he was relieved by the absence of Albert, whose little daily
+regimen, even when directed by competent assistance, had begun to grind
+into his father's consciousness. I even believe that the one serious
+drawback in Raymond's comfortable summer was the need of studying over a
+school for Albert in the fall.
+
+Raymond spent much of his time among his books. He had long since given
+up trying to "write anything"; less than ever was he in a mood to try
+that sort of exercise now. He looked over his shelves and resolved that
+he would make up a collection of books for the Art Museum. They were to
+be books on architecture, of which he had many. The Museum library, with
+hundreds of architectural students in and out, had few volumes in
+architecture, or none. He visioned a Raymond Prince alcove--those boys
+should be enabled to learn about the Byzantine buildings, just then
+coming into their own; and about the Renaissance in all its varieties,
+especially the Spanish Plateresque. He had a number of expensive and
+elaborate publications which dealt with that period, and with others,
+and he resolved to add new works from outside. He resumed his habit of
+going to book-auctions (though little developed at them), dickered with
+local dealers who limited themselves to a choice clientèle, and sent to
+London for catalogues over which he studied endlessly. He would still
+play the rôle of patron and benefactor. Perhaps he foresaw the time when
+the Museum would recognize donors of a certain importance by bronze
+memorial tablets set up in its entrance hall. Well, he would make his
+alcove important enough for any measure of recognition. It was all a
+work which interested him in its details and which was more in
+correspondence than a larger one with his present means.
+
+
+II
+
+Before my wife and I left for an outing on the seaboard, news came from
+that quarter about Gertrude and Albert. Intelligence even reached us,
+through the same correspondent, regarding Mrs. Johnny McComas. Mrs.
+Johnny, with her three children, was frequenting the same sands and the
+same board walk. It was possible to imagine the arrangement as having
+been suggested by Raymond's one-time wife. See it for yourself. Mrs.
+Raymond and Mrs. Johnny slowly promenading back and forth together, or
+seated side by side beneath their respective parasols or under some gay
+awning shared in common, while their authentic children played about
+them. What if people--whether friends, acquaintances, or
+strangers--_did_ say, "She is divorced"? There she was, with her own son
+plainly beside her and her closest woman friend giving her complete
+countenance. If a separation, who to blame? The husband, doubtless. In
+fact, there was already springing up in her Eastern circle, I was to
+find, the tradition of a dour, stiff man, years too old, with whom it
+was impossible to live.
+
+It is unlikely that Gertrude, at any time--even at this time--would have
+been willing to rank Mrs. Johnny as her closest friend. But Mrs. Johnny
+had spoken a good word for her in a trying season, and at the present
+juncture her friendly presence was invaluable. She could speak a good
+word now--she was, so to say, a continuing witness. The two, I presume,
+were seen together a good deal, along with the children, especially
+Albert; and Mrs. Johnny, coöperating (if unconsciously) with Gertrude's
+mother, did much to stabilize a somewhat uncertain situation.
+
+It was the understanding that Mrs. Johnny was in rather poor health this
+summer; the birth of her little daughter had left her a different woman,
+and the tonic of the sea-air was needed to remake her into her
+high-colored and energetic self. There was nothing especially reviving
+in the Wisconsin lakes, to which (placid inland ponds) they had confined
+their previous summer sojourns: and the vogue of the fresher resorts
+farther north on the greater lakes had not yet reached them. This year
+let the salt surf roll and the salt winds blow.
+
+My wife and I, in our Eastern peregrinations, passed a few days at the
+particular beach frequented by the two mothers. We really found in Mrs.
+Johnny's aspect and carriage some justification for the incredible
+legend of her poor health. She walked with less vigor than formerly and
+was glad to sit down more frequently; and once or twice we saw her
+taking the air at her bedroom window instead of on the broad walk before
+the shops. Her boys played robustly on the sands, and would play with
+Albert--or rather, let him play with them--if urged to. But, like most
+twins, they were self-sufficing; besides, they were several years older.
+To produce the full effect of team-work between the families required
+some perseverance and a bit of manoeuvring. The little girl was hardly
+two.
+
+Gertrude and her mother welcomed us rather emphatically--too
+emphatically, we felt. The latter offered us politic lunches in the
+large dining-room of their hotel, and laid great stress upon our
+_provenance_ when we met her friends on the promenade. We seemed to be
+becoming a part of a general plan of campaign--pawns on the board. This
+shortened our stay.
+
+The day before we left, Johnny McComas himself appeared. He had found a
+way to leave his widely ramifying interests for a few odd hours. A man
+of the right temperament gains greatly by a temporary estival
+transplantation; and if Johnny always contrived to seem dominant and
+prosperous at home, he now seemed lordly and triumphant abroad. He
+"dressed the part": he was almost as over-appropriately inappropriate as
+little Albert himself. He played ostentatiously with his boys on the
+sands, and did not mind Albert as one of their eye-drawing party. He,
+whether his wife did or no, responded fully and immediately to the salt
+waves and the salt winds.
+
+"Immense! isn't it?" he said to me, throwing out his chest to the breeze
+and teetering in his white shoes, out of sheer abundance of vitality, on
+the planks beneath him.
+
+There was only one drawback: his wife was really not well. And he
+wondered audibly to me, while my own wife was having a few words near by
+with Gertrude, how it was that a young woman could, within the first
+year of her married life, bear twins with no hurt or harm, and yet
+weaken, later, through the birth of a single child.
+
+"She doesn't seem at all lively, that's a fact," he said, with a
+possible touch of impatience. "But another two weeks will do wonders for
+her," he added: "she'll go back all right."
+
+Prepotent Johnny! No doubt it was a drain on vitality to live abreast of
+such a man, to keep step with his robustious stride.
+
+On the forenoon of the day we left, Johnny was walking with Gertrude and
+her mother along the accepted promenade. His excess of vitality and of
+action gave him an air of gallantry not altogether pleasing to see. His
+wife sat at her window, looking down and waving her hand rather
+languidly. The Johnny of her belief had come, in part, assuredly, for a
+bit of enjoyment. She smiled unconcernedly.
+
+
+III
+
+Raymond waited back home for Albert, and Albert did not return. We
+gathered from a newspaper published near the shores of Narragansett Bay
+that Albert, as his mother's triumphant possession, was now being shown
+at another resort--and a more important one, judging by his
+grandmother's social affiliations; also, that Mrs. McComas, who had not
+done any too well on the Jersey shore, was appearing at the new
+_plage_--doubtless as the just and sympathetic friend (of social
+prominence in her own community) who had stood stanch through
+difficulties unjustly endured. Her husband himself had, of course,
+returned to the West.
+
+His business called him, even in mid-summer. He had his bank, but he had
+more than his bank. There are banks and banks--you can divide them up in
+several different ways. There are, of course,--as we have seen,--the
+banks that fail, and the banks that do not. And there are the banks that
+exist as an end in themselves, and the banks that exist as a means to
+other things: those that function along methodically, without taking on
+any extraneous features; and those that serve as a nucleus for
+accumulating interests, as a fulcrum to move affairs through a wide and
+varied range. Of this kind was McComas's. Johnny was not the man to
+stand still and let routine take its way--not the man to mark time, even
+through the vacation season. Nor could he have done so even if he had
+wanted to. But all I need say, just here, is that he came back home
+again after three or four days, all told, and that any threatened
+embarassment was nullified, or at least postponed.
+
+Raymond heard in silence my account of the doings on the Atlantic shore:
+only a wry twist of the mouth and a flare of the nostrils. But as the
+weeks went on, and still no Albert, his anger became articulate.
+
+"I shall teach her that an agreement is an agreement," he declared. "She
+will never try this again."
+
+Albert finally came home, three weeks late; his mother brought him
+herself. The governess transferred him from the hands of one parent to
+those of the other; and Raymond had asked my presence for that moment,
+as a sort of moral urge.
+
+"Who knows," he asked, "what delay she may try for next?"
+
+He gave one look at the picturesque, if not fantastic, toggery of his
+restored child.
+
+"Did you ever see anything like that?" he said scornfully; and I foresaw
+a sacrificial bonfire--or its equivalent--with Albert presently clothed
+in sane autumn garb.
+
+Albert was followed, within a week, by a letter from his mother. This
+was diffuse and circumlocutory, like the first. But its general sense
+was clear. If Raymond was thinking of putting Albert into a
+boarding-school....
+
+"There she goes again!" exclaimed the exacerbated father. "A matter with
+which, by hard-and-fast agreement, she has absolutely nothing to do!"
+
+However, if he was thinking of a boarding-school....
+
+"A child barely seven!" cried Raymond. "Why, half of them will hardly
+consider one of eight!"
+
+Still, if he was thinking--well, Mrs. McComas knew of a charming one, an
+old-established one, one in which the head-master's wife, a delightful,
+motherly soul.... And it was just within the Wisconsin line, not forty
+miles from town....
+
+"I see her camping at the gate!" said Raymond bitterly. "Or taking a
+house there. Or spending months at a hotel near by. Constantly fussing
+round the edge of things. Running in on every visitors' day...."
+
+"Likely enough," I said. "A mother's a mother."
+
+"Well," rejoined Raymond, "the boy _shall_ go to school--in another
+year. But the school will be a good deal more than forty miles from
+here--no continual week-end trips. And it will not be in a town that has
+an endurable hotel--that ought to be easy to arrange, in this part of
+the world. No, it won't be near any town at all. I don't suppose she
+would take a--tent?" he queried sardonically.
+
+"To some mothers the blue tent of heaven would alone suffice," I
+said--perhaps unworthily.
+
+"Rubbish!" he ejaculated; and I felt that a word fitly spoken--or
+perhaps unfittingly--was rebuked.
+
+
+IV
+
+In due season, Albert went off to school, according to his father's
+plans; and it was not the school which Adele McComas had hoped to see
+Albert enter a little before her own boys should leave it. Raymond,
+after another year of daily attentions to Albert's small daily concerns,
+was glad to have him away. He did not see his boy's mother a frequent
+visitor at this school, nor did he purpose being a frequent visitor
+himself. The establishment was approved, well-recommended: let it do its
+work unaided, unhindered.
+
+No, Adele McComas never saw Albert at the school of her predilection;
+indeed, it was not long after the choice had been made that she lost all
+opportunity of seeing anything at all. She withered out, like a
+high-colored, hardy-seeming flower that belies all promise, and died
+when her little girl was months short of four.
+
+Her name was on the new monument within six weeks. It was the third
+name. That of Johnny's father had lately been placed above that of his
+mother, and that of his wife was now clearly legible upon the opposite
+side of the shaft's base. Some of Johnny's friends saw in this
+promptitude a high mark of respect and affection; others felt a haste,
+almost undue, to turn the new erection into a bulletin of "actualities";
+and a few surmised that had the work not been done with promptitude it
+might have come to be done in a leisurely fashion that spelled neglect:
+if it were to be done, 't were well it were done quickly--a formal token
+of regard checked off and disposed of.
+
+During Albert's first year at his school his mother made two or three
+appearances. She was exigent, and she showed herself to the school
+authorities as fertile in blandishments. The last of her visits was made
+in a high-powered touring-car. Raymond heard of this, and warned the
+school head against a possible attempt at abduction.
+
+The second year opened more quietly. One visit--a visit without
+eagerness and obviously lacking in any fell intent, and that was all.
+It was fair to surmise that this once-urgent, once-vehement mother had
+developed a newer and more compelling interest.
+
+She had made herself a figure at Adele McComas's funeral--or, at least,
+others had made her a figure at it. She began to be seen here and there
+in the company of the widower, and it was reported privately to me that
+she had been perceived standing side by side with him in decorous
+contemplation, as it were in a sort of transient, elegiac revery _à
+deux_, before the monument. It was no surprise, therefore, when we
+heard, two months later, that they had married.
+
+"That stable-boy!" said Raymond. "After--me!"
+
+The expression was strong, and I did not care to assent.
+
+Instead, I began:--
+
+"And now, whatever may or may not have been, everything is--"
+
+"Everything is right, at last!" he concluded for me.
+
+"And if they--those two--are put in the right," he went on, "I suppose I
+am put in the wrong--and more in the wrong than ever!"
+
+He stared forward, across his littered table, beyond his bookcases,
+through his thick-lensed glasses, as if confronting the stiffening
+legend of a husband too old, too dry, too unpliable; the victim,
+finally, of a sudden turn that was peculiarly malapropos and
+disrelishing, the head of a household tricked rather ridiculously before
+the world.
+
+Reserve now began to grow on him. He simplified relationships and saw
+fewer people. Before these, and before the many at a greater remove, he
+would maintain a cautious dignity as a detached and individual human
+creature, as a man,--however much, in the world's eyes, he might have
+seemed to fail as a husband.
+
+
+V
+
+John W. McComas, at forty-five, was in apogee. His bank, as I have said,
+was coming to be more than a mere bank; it was now the focus of many
+miscellaneous enterprises. Several of these were industrial companies;
+prospectuses bearing his name and that of his institution constantly
+came my way. Some of these undertakings were novel and daring, but most
+of them went through; and he was more likely to use his associates than
+they were to use him. As I have said, he possessed but two interests in
+the world: his business--now his businesses--and his family; and he
+concentrated on both. It might be said that he insisted on the most
+which each would yield.
+
+He concentrated on his new domestic life with peculiar intensity. His
+boys were away at a preparatory school and were looking forward to
+college. He centred on his daughter, a future hope, and on his wife, a
+present reality and triumph. Over her, in particular, he bent like a
+flame, a bright flame that dazzled and did not yet sear. He was able, by
+this time, to coalesce with the general tradition in which she had been
+brought up--or at least with the newer tradition to which she had
+adjusted herself; and he was able to bring to bear a personal power the
+application of which she had never experienced. She found herself
+handled with decision. She almost liked it--at least it simplified some
+teasing problems. He employed a direct, bluff, hearty kindness; but
+strength underlay the kindness, and came first--came uppermost--if
+occasion seriously required. Life with Raymond had been a laxative, when
+not an irritant; life with Johnny McComas became a tonic. She had felt
+somewhat loose and demoralized; now she felt braced.
+
+Johnny was rich, and was getting richer yet. He was richer, much, than
+he had been but a few years before; richer than Raymond Prince, whose
+worldly fortunes seemed rather to dip. Johnny could give his wife
+whatever she fancied; when she hesitated, things were urged upon her,
+forced upon her. She, in her turn, was now a delegate of luxury. He
+approved--and insisted upon--a showy, emphatic way of life, and a more
+than liberal scale of expenditure. He wanted to show the world what he
+could do for a fine woman; and I believe he wanted to show Raymond
+Prince.
+
+Gossip had long since faded away to nothingness. If anybody had wondered
+at Johnny's course--a course that had run through possible dubiousness
+to hard-and-fast finality--the wonder was now inaudible. If anybody felt
+in him a lack of fastidiousness, the point was not pressed. The marriage
+seemed a happy solution, on the whole; and the people most
+concerned--those who met the new pair--appeared to feel that a problem
+was off the board and glad to have it so.
+
+Raymond, on the eve of the marriage, had softened things for himself by
+leaving for a few months in Rome. Back, he began to cast about for some
+means of occupation and some way of making a careful assertion of his
+dignity. At this time "society" was beginning to sail more noticeably
+about the edge of the arts, and an important coterie was feeling that
+something might well be done to lift the drama from its state of
+degradation. Why not build--or remodel--a theatre, they asked, form a
+stock company, compose a repertory, and see together a series of such
+performances as might be viewed without a total departure from taste and
+intelligence?
+
+The experiment ran its own quaint course. The remodeling of the hall
+chosen introduced the sponsors of the movement to the fire-laws and
+resulted in a vast, unlooked-for expense. A good company--though less
+stress was laid on its roster than on the list of guarantors--went
+astray in the hands of a succession of directors, not always competent.
+The subscribers refused to occupy their boxes more than one night a
+week, and, later on, not even that: the space was filled for a while
+with servitors and domestic dependents, and presently by nobody....
+
+Raymond went into the enterprise. He put in a goodly sum of money that
+never came back to him; and if he coöperated but indifferently, or
+worse, he was not more inept than some of his associates. He was
+displeased to learn that the McComases had given enough to the
+guarantee-fund to insure them a box. And it offended him that, on the
+opening night, his former wife, one of a large and assertive party,
+should make her voice heard during intermissions (and at some other
+times too) quite across the small auditorium. The situation was
+generally felt to be piquant, and at the end of the performance people
+in the lobby were amused (save the few who had the affair greatly at
+heart) to hear Johnny McComas's comment on the play. It was a
+far-fetched problem-play from the German, and Raymond had been one of
+those who favored it for an opening.
+
+"Did you ever see such a play in your life?" queried Johnny. "What was
+it all about? And wasn't _he_ the fool!"
+
+McComas--really caring nothing for the evening's entertainment either
+way--could easily afford a large amount for social prestige, and his
+wife for general social consolidation. It was little to Johnny that his
+thousands went up in exacting systems of ventilation and in salaries for
+an expensive staff; but it was awkward for Raymond to lose a sum which,
+while absolutely less, was relatively much greater. After a few months
+the scheme was dropped; the expensive installation went to the advantage
+of a vaudeville manager; Raymond felt poorer, even slightly crippled,
+and the voice of the present Mrs. Johnny McComas ran till the end
+across that tiny _salle_.
+
+This, I am glad to say, was the last of Raymond's endeavors to patronize
+the arts.
+
+
+VI
+
+Albert's last year at his distant school ended rather abruptly. He came
+home, ailing, about a month before the close of the school year. He was
+thin and languid. He may have been growing too fast; he may have been
+studying too hard; he may have missed the "delightful motherly soul" who
+would have brooded over him at the school first proposed; or the
+drinking-water may have been infected--_que sais-je_? Well, Albert moped
+during much of May through the big house, and his mother heard of his
+return and his moping, made the most of it, and insisted on a
+visitation.
+
+The child-element, of late, had not been large in her life. Her two tall
+stepsons were flourishing in absence; she had had no second child of her
+own; little Althea was nice enough, and she liked her pretty well....
+But there was her own flesh and blood crying for her--perhaps. So she
+descended on the old, familiar interior--familiar and distasteful--and
+resumed with zeal the rôle of mother.
+
+Her presence was awkward, anomalous. The servants were disconcerted, and
+scarcely knew how to take her fluttery yet imperious orders. For Raymond
+himself, as any one could see, it was all purgatory--or worse. Every
+room had its peculiar and disagreeable memories. There was the
+chamber-threshold over which they had discussed her tendency to out-mode
+the mode and to push every extreme of fashion to an extreme still more
+daring--for that black gown with spangles, or whatever, had been but the
+first of a long, flagrant line. There was the particular spot in the
+front hall, before that monumental, old-fashioned, black-walnut
+"hat-rack," where he had cautioned more care in her attitude toward
+young bachelors, if only in consideration of his own dignity, his
+"face." There was the dining-room--yes, she stayed to meals, of course,
+and to many of them!--where (in the temporary absence of service) he
+had criticized more than once the details of her housekeeping and of her
+menu--had told her just how he "wanted things" and how he meant to have
+them. And in each case she had pouted, or scoffed, and had contrived
+somehow to circumvent him, to thwart him, and to get with well-cloaked,
+or with uncloaked, insistence her own way. Heavenly recollections! He
+felt, too, from her various glances and shrugs, that the house was more
+of a horror to her than ever, and, above all, that abominable
+orchestrion more hugely preposterous.
+
+Albert kept mostly to his room. It was the same room which Raymond
+himself had occupied as a boy. It had the same view of that window above
+the stable at which Johnny McComas had sorted his insects and arranged
+his stamps. The stable was now, of course, a garage; but the time was on
+the way when both car and chauffeur would be dispensed with. Parallel
+wires still stretched between house and garage, as an evidence of
+Raymond's endeavor to fill in the remnant of Albert's previous vacation
+with some entertaining novelty that might help wipe out his recollection
+of the month lately spent with his mother. Albert was modern enough to
+prefer wireless--just then coming in--to "bugs" and postage-stamps; but
+the time remaining had been short. Besides, Albert liked the theatre
+better; and Raymond, during those last weeks in August, had sat through
+many woeful and stifling performances of vaudeville that he might regain
+and keep his hold on his son. His presence at these functions was
+observed and was commented upon by several persons who were aware of the
+aid he was giving for a bettered stage.
+
+"Fate's irony!" he himself would sometimes say inwardly, with a sidelong
+glance at Albert, preoccupied with knockabouts or trained dogs.
+
+Albert spent some of his daylight hours in bed; some in moving about the
+room spiritlessly. He looked out with lack-lustre eyes at the sagging
+wires, and seemed to be wondering how they could ever have interested
+him. His mother, as soon as she saw him, put him at death's door--at
+least she saw him headed straight for that dark portal. She began to
+insist, after a few days, that he go home with her: he would be hers, by
+right, within a fortnight, anyhow. Her new house, she declared, would be
+an immensely better place for him, and would immensely help him to get
+well, if--with a half-sob--he ever _was_ to get well.
+
+She knew, of course, the early legend of Johnny McComas, and had no wish
+to linger in its locale.
+
+"You _do_ want to go with your own, own mother--don't you, dear?"
+
+"Yes," replied Albert faintly.
+
+The town-house of Johnny McComas, bought at an open-eyed bargain and on
+a purely commercial basis, had some time since fulfilled its predestined
+function. It had been taken over, at a very good price, by an automobile
+company; the purchasers had begun to tear it down before the last load
+of furniture was fairly out, and had quickly run up a big block in
+russet brick and plate glass. Gertrude McComas had had no desire to
+inherit memories of her predecessor; if she had not urged the promptest
+action her husband's plan might have given him a still more gratifying
+profit.
+
+They had built their new house out on the North Shore. At one time the
+society of that quarter had seemed, however desirable to the McComases,
+somewhat inaccessible. But the second wife was more likely to help
+Johnny thitherward than the first. Besides, the participation of the new
+pair in the scheme of dramatic uplift--however slight, essentially--had
+made the promised land nearer and brighter. They might now transplant
+themselves to that desired field with a certainty of some few social
+relations secured in advance.
+
+They had a long-reaching, rough-cast house, in a semi-Spanish style,
+high above the water. They had ten acres of lawn and thicket. They had
+their own cow. And there was little Althea--a nice enough child--for a
+playmate.
+
+"Let me get Albert away from all this smoke and grime," his mother
+pleaded--or argued--or demanded, dramatically. "Let me give him the
+pure country air. Let me give him the right things to eat and drink. Let
+me look after his poor little clothes,--if" (with another half-sob) "he
+is ever to wear them again. Let me give him a real mother's real care.
+You _would_ like that better, wouldn't you, dear?"
+
+"Yes," said Albert faintly.
+
+It is quite possible, of course, that his school really had scanted the
+motherly touch.
+
+"You see how it goes!" Raymond finally said to me, one evening, in the
+shadow of the orchestrion. "And what she will dress him in _this_
+time...!"
+
+The whole situation wore on him horribly. There was a light play over
+his cheeks and jaws: I almost heard his teeth grit.
+
+A few days later Albert was transferred to his mother's place in the
+country. Raymond consoled himself as best he might with the thought that
+this sojourn was, after all, but preliminary, as Gertrude had herself
+implied, to the coming month on the Maine coast or at Mackinac. A change
+of air, a greater change of air, a change to an air immensely and
+unmistakably and immediately tonic and upbuilding--that, as his mother
+stated, with emphasis, was what Albert required.
+
+So Albert, by way of introduction to his real summer, came to be
+domiciled under the splendid new roof of Johnny McComas--a roof, to
+Raymond's exacerbated sense, gleaming but heavy. Its tiles--he had not
+seen them, but he readily visualized them--bore him down. He was not
+obliged, as yet, to meet McComas himself. That came later.
+
+
+
+
+PART VII
+
+I
+
+
+Albert recovered in due season--a little more rapidly, it may be, than
+if he had stayed with his father, but not more completely. His education
+progressed, entering another phase, and still with the unauthorized
+coöperation of his mother. During his stay with her she had really
+wrought no great havoc in his wardrobe, whatever she may have
+accomplished on a previous occasion. In fact, Albert had reached the
+point where he dressed in a manlier fashion--a fashion fortunately
+standardized beyond a mother's whims. In his turn, as it had been with
+his brothers by marriage, it was now the real preparatory school, with
+college looming ahead.
+
+By this time Raymond had completely made his belated adieux to æsthetic
+concerns and had begun to concentrate on practical matters--on his own.
+They needed his attention, even if he had not the right quality of
+attention to give. I had my doubts, and they did not grow less as time
+went on. Raymond was now within hail of fifty, and he added to his long
+list of earlier mistakes a new mistake peculiar to his years and to his
+training--or his lack of it.
+
+Briefly, he assumed that age in itself brought knowledge, and that young
+men in their twenties--even their late twenties--were but boys. The
+disadvantage of holding this view became apparent when he began to do
+business with them. He depended too much on his own vague fund of
+experience, and did not realize how dangerous it might be to encounter
+keen specialists--however young--in their own field. He was now engaged
+in a general recasting of his affairs, and they came to him in
+numbers--bright, boyish, young fellows, he called them. He tended to
+patronize them, and he began to deal with them rather informally and
+much too confidently.
+
+The family bank, after languishing along for a liberal time under its
+receiver, had been wound up, and the stockholders, among whom he was a
+large one but far from the largest, accepted the results and turned wry
+faces to new prospects elsewhere. The family holdings of real-estate, on
+the edge of the central district rather than in it, did not share the
+general and almost automatic advance in values, and an uncertain,
+slow-moving scheme for a general public improvement--one that
+continually promised to eventuate yet continually held off--had kept one
+of his warehouses vacant for years: its only income was contributed by
+an advertising company, which utilized part of its front as a
+bulletin-board. Rents in this quarter kept down, though taxes--more
+through rising rates than increased valuations--went up. And those two
+big old houses! Raymond still lived, too expensively in one, and paid
+interest on a cumbering old mortgage. The other--old Jehiel's--was
+rented, at no great advantage, to a kind of correspondence school which
+conducted dubious courses and was precarious pay.
+
+In such circumstances Raymond began to lend an ear to offers of
+"real-estate trades" and to suggestions for reinvestments. But
+real-estate, in which almost everybody had once dabbled (with advantage
+assumed and usually realized), had now become a game for experts.
+Profits for the few: disaster--or at least disillusionment--for the
+many. Raymond thought he could "exchange" to advantage, and the bright
+young men (who knew what they were about much better than he did)
+flocked to help him. Well, one man in a hundred exchanges with profit;
+the ninety-and-nine, the further they go the more they lose--onions
+peeled coat by coat. Thus Raymond, until I heard of some of his
+operations and tried to stop them. One frank-faced, impudent young chap,
+who thought he was secure in a contract, I had to frighten off; but
+others had preceded him.
+
+Investments were offered him too: schemes in town, and schemes--bolder
+and more numerous--out of town. Some of these had the support of McComas
+and his "crowd," and turned out advantageously enough, for those on the
+"inside"--to continue the jargon of the day and its interests; but
+Raymond sensitively, even fastidiously, stepped away from these, and
+trusted himself, rather, to financial free lances who often were not
+only without principle, but also without definite foothold.
+
+"If you would only consult me!" more than once I had occasion to
+remonstrate. "Who are these people? What organization have they
+got--what responsibility?"
+
+But though he would dicker with strangers, who took hours of his time
+with their specious palaverings, he shrank more and more from his own
+tenants and his own agents. One rather important lease had to be renewed
+over his head--or behind his back. Still, I do not know that, on this
+particular occasion, his interests greatly suffered.
+
+Thus Raymond began to approach a permanent impairment of his affairs at
+an age when recuperation for a man of his deficiencies was as good as
+out of the question. Further on still he began to suspect--even to
+realize--that he was unfitted to cope with adults. In his later fifties
+he began to pat children on their heads in parks and to rub the noses
+of horses in the streets. With the younger creatures of the human race
+and with the gentler orders of the brute creation he felt he could trust
+himself, and still escape disaster. If he found little girls sticking
+rows of fallen catalpa-blossoms on the spikes of iron fences, he would
+stop and praise their powers of design. He became susceptible to tiny
+boys in brown sweaters or infinitesimal blue overalls, and he seldom
+passed without a touch of sympathy the mild creatures that helped
+deliver the laundry-bundles or the milk. Especially if they were white:
+he was always sorry, he said, for white coats in a dirty town.
+
+But such matters of advancing age are for the future.
+
+
+II
+
+As regards the affairs of McComas, I naturally had a lesser knowledge.
+They were more numerous and more complicated; nor was I close to them. I
+can only say that they went on prosperously, and continued to go on
+prosperously: their success justified his concentration on them.
+
+As regards his home and his domestic affairs, I can have more to say. My
+wife and I called once or twice at their new house; with a daughter of
+twenty-odd, there was no reason why we should not cultivate that
+particular suburb, and every reason why we should.
+
+Johnny's two sons were at home, briefly, as seniors who were soon to
+graduate. They were tall, hearty lads, with some of their father's high
+coloring. One of them was to be injured on the ball-field in his last
+term, and to die at home a month later. The other, recovering some of
+the individuality which a twin sometimes finds it none too easy to
+assert, was to marry before he had been out of college six weeks--marry
+young, like his father before him. The girl, young Althea, rather
+resembling her mother,--her own mother,--was beginning to think less of
+large hair-bows and more of longer dresses. Her father was quite wrapped
+up in her and her stepmother seemed to take to her kindly.
+
+Johnny, in conducting us over his house, laid great stress on her room.
+On her suite, rather; or even on her wing. She had her own study, her
+own bath, her own sleeping porch and sun-parlor. Everything had been
+very delicately and richly done. And she had her own runabout in the
+garage.
+
+"The boys will go, of course," Johnny said to us, with his arm about his
+daughter; "but our little Althea will be a good girl and not leave her
+poor old father."
+
+Ah, yes, girls sometimes have a way of lingering at home. Our own Elsie
+has always remained faithful to her parents.
+
+Johnny had chosen to call himself "old" and "poor." Of course he looked
+neither. True, his chestnut hair was beginning to gray; but it made,
+unless clipped closer than he always wore it, at least an intimation of
+a florid aureole of crisp vigor; and his whole person gave an exudation
+of power and prosperity. No sorrow had come to him beyond the death of
+his parents--an inevitable loss which he had duly recorded in public.
+That record had yet to receive another name--and yet another.
+
+His wife, who had seemed to begin by bracing herself to stand against
+him, now seemed to have braced herself to stand with him--perhaps a more
+commendable wifely attitude. I mean that the discipline incident to a
+life of success which was not without its rigors had become to her
+almost a second nature. The order of the day was coöperation, team-work;
+in the grand advance she was no straggler, no malingerer. It was a
+matter of pride to keep step with him; she was now beyond the fear which
+possibly for the first few years had troubled her--the fear that he, by
+word, or look, or even by silence, might hint to her that she was not
+fully "keeping up." Johnny himself was now rather heavy; for the regimen
+which they were pursuing he had the strength that insured against any
+loss of flesh through tax on the nerves. His wife, for her part, looked
+rather lean--trained, even trained down. As the wife of Raymond, she
+would probably have lapsed by now into pinguitude and sloth--unless
+discontent and exasperation had prevented.
+
+After showing us the private grandeurs of their own estate, they
+motored us to the coördinated splendors of their club. It had been a
+good club--one of the best of its kind--from the start, and now it had
+grown bigger and better. Its arcaded porches and its verandas were wide;
+its links showed the hand of the expert, yet also the sensitive touch of
+the landscape gardener; an orchestra of greater size and merit than is
+common in such heedless gatherings played for itself if not for the
+gossiping, stirring throng; and people talked golf-jargon (for which I
+don't care) and polo (of which I know even less). Though the day was one
+in the relatively early spring, things were "going"; temporary backsets
+would doubtless ensue--meanwhile get the good out of a clear, fair
+afternoon, if but a single one.
+
+Through all this gay stir the McComases contrived to make themselves
+duly felt. Johnny himself was one of the governors, I gathered; as such
+he took part in a small, hurried confab in the smoking-room. Whether or
+not there was a point in dispute, I do not know; but when he rose and
+led me forth with his curved palm under my elbow the matter had been
+settled his way, and no ill-feeling left: rather, as I sensed it, a
+feeling of relief that some one had promptly and energetically laid a
+moot question for once and all.
+
+His two tall boys I saw walking, with an amiable air of an habituated
+understanding, around a billiard-table: "Can you beat them?" asked
+Johnny proudly, as we passed the open window. His daughter circulated
+confidently, as being almost a member in full and regular standing
+herself. She seemed to know intimately any number of girls of her own
+age, and even a few lads of seventeen or so--an advantage which our
+Elsie, at that stage, never quite enjoyed, and which, due allowance made
+for altered conditions, she was somewhat slow in gaining, later.
+
+And about his wife? Well, the slate appeared to have been wiped--if
+there really had been any definite marks upon it. Assuredly no smears
+were left to show. Those of the younger generation of seven or eight
+years before had used the time and arranged their futures, and the
+still younger were pressing into their places--witness Johnny's own
+brood. Gertrude McComas was now a self-assured though careful
+matron--careful, I thought, not to ask too much of general society;
+careful not to notice whether or no she received too little; careful,
+most of all, not to let it appear that she _was_ careful. Perhaps it was
+this care which made up a part of her general strain--and enabled her to
+keep the lithe slenderness of her early figure.
+
+We came back to town--the three of us--by train. Both of my Elsies were
+thoughtful. Certainly we were playing a less brilliant part than the
+family we had just left.
+
+
+III
+
+Meanwhile Albert pursued his studies. Though he had not so far to come
+for a short vacation as the McComas young men, he spent the short
+vacations at the school. He was at an awkward age, and Raymond, who
+could see him with eyes not unduly clouded by affection, felt him to be
+an unpromising cub. He was no adornment for any house, and no
+satisfying companion for his father. So he passed the Easter week among
+his teachers.
+
+McComas too saw little of Albert. Those months with his mother were
+usually worked off at some distant resort, which his stepfather was
+often too busy to reach. Only once did he spend any of the allotted time
+in McComas's house. This was a fortnight in that grandiose yet tawdry
+fabric which had been sacrificed to business, and the occasion was an
+illness in the family (not Albert's) which delayed the summer's outing.
+McComas had accepted Albert with a large tolerance--at least he was not
+annoyed. In fact, the boy's mother, however she may have harassed
+Raymond, never (to do her justice) pushed Albert on her second husband.
+So, when the juncture arrived,--
+
+"Why, yes," Johnny had said, "have him here, of course; and let him stay
+as long as you like. He doesn't bother _me_."
+
+Well, Albert went ahead, doing his Latin, and groping farther into the
+dusky penumbra of mathematics. "Why?" he asked; and they explained that
+it was the necessary preparation for the university. Albert pondered. He
+began to fear that he must continue learning things he didn't want or
+need, so that he might go ahead toward learning other things he didn't
+want or need. He took a plaintive, discouraged tone in a letter to his
+mother; and she--making an exception to her rule--passed along the
+protest to McComas. She felt, I suppose, that he would give an answering
+note.
+
+Johnny laughed. He himself cared nothing for study; and he was so
+happily constituted, as well as so constantly occupied, that he never
+had to take refuge in a book.
+
+"Oh, well," he said, broadly, "he'll live through it all, and live it
+down. I expect Tom and Joe to. The final gains will be in quite another
+direction."
+
+Raymond had heard the same plaint from Albert, and was less pleased. The
+boy was clearly to be no student, still less a lover of the arts.
+Raymond passed over all thought of old Jehiel, the ruthlessly
+acquisitive, and placed the blame on the other grandfather, who was now
+in an early dotage after a lifelong harnessing to the stock-ticker.
+
+"_I_ don't know how he's coming out!" was Raymond's impatient remark,
+over one of Albert's letters. "Who knows what _any_ boy is going to be?"
+
+Albert accepted his school readily enough as a place of residence. He
+did not now need, so much as before, his mother's small cares--in fact,
+was glad to be relieved from them; nor was he quite advanced enough to
+profit from a cautious father's hints and suggestions. I found myself
+hoping that Raymond, at the coming stage of Albert's development, might
+have as little trouble as I had had over my own boy (with whose early
+career I shall not burden you). Yet, after all, fathers may
+apprehensively exchange views and cautiously devise methods of approach
+only to find their efforts superfluous: so many boys come through
+perfectly well, after all. Simply consider, for example, those in our
+old singing-class. The only one to occasion any inconvenience was Johnny
+McComas, and he was not a member at all.
+
+The one side of the matter that began to concern Raymond was the money
+side. Albert cost at school, and was going to cost more at college. His
+father began to economize. For instance, he cut off, this spring, the
+contribution which he had been making for years in support of an
+organization of reformers that had been working for civic betterment.
+These men, considering their small number and their limited resources
+had done wonders in raising the tone and quality of the local
+administration. The city's reputation, outside, had become respectable.
+But a sag had begun to show itself--the relapse that is pretty certain
+to follow on an extreme and perhaps overstrained endeavor. The little
+band needed money. Raymond was urged to reconsider and to continue--the
+upgrade would soon be reached again. Raymond sent, reluctantly, a
+smaller amount and asked why the net for contributions was not cast a
+little wider. He even suggested a few names.
+
+Whether he mentioned the name of John W. McComas I do not know, but
+McComas was given an opportunity to help.
+
+"See what they've sent me," he said to me one day on the street.
+
+He smiled over the urgent, fervid phrases of the appeal. The world, so
+far as he was concerned, was going very well. It didn't need
+improvement; and if it did, he hadn't the time to improve it.
+
+"They appear to be losing their grip," he added. "They didn't do very
+well last election, anyhow."
+
+I sensed his reluctance to be associated with a cause that seemed to be
+a losing one.
+
+"Well, I don't know," I said. "I'm giving something myself; and if I can
+afford to, you can."
+
+But he developed no interest. He sent a check absurdly disproportionate
+to his capacity (he was embarrassed, I am glad to say, when he mentioned
+later the amount); and I incline to think that even this bit was done
+almost out of a personal regard for me.
+
+Raymond cut a part of his own contribution out of Albert's allowance,
+and there was better reason than ever why Albert should not take a long
+trip for only four or five days at home.
+
+
+IV
+
+It is tiresome, I know, to read about municipal reform; most of us want
+the results and not the process--and some of us not even the results.
+And it is no less tiresome to read about investments, unless we are
+dealing with some young knight of finance who strives successfully for
+his lady's favor and who, successful, lives with her ever after in the
+style to which her father has accustomed her. But in the case of a
+maladroit man of fifty....
+
+I had asked Raymond to call on me with any new scheme that was taking
+his attention, and one forenoon he walked in.
+
+He had an envelope of loose papers. He laid some of them on my desk and
+thumbed a few others with an undecided expression.
+
+"What do you think of this?" he asked. "I've got to have more money, and
+here's something that may bring it in."
+
+It was a speculative industrial affair in Upper Michigan. I saw some
+familiar names attached--among them that of John W. McComas, though not
+prominently.
+
+"I'll find out for you," I said.
+
+"I don't want you to find out from him."
+
+"I'll find out."
+
+Raymond fingered his envelope fussily: there was nothing left in it.
+
+"It's all costing me too much. Extras at that school. That big
+house--too big, too expensive. I can't lug it along any farther. Find me
+some one to buy it."
+
+"I'll see," I said.
+
+I told him about our visit to the club, two or three months before. I
+implied, in as delicate and circumambulatory a way as possible, that his
+one-time wife, according to my own observations, taken under peculiarly
+favorable, because exacting, conditions, was completely accepted.
+
+"Oh yes," he replied, as if the matter had been settled years ago, and
+as if he had long had that sense of it. Yes, he seemed to be saying, the
+marriage had made it all right for her, and had soon begun to make it
+better for him. Possibly not a "deceived" husband; and no longer so
+rawly flagrant a failure as a human companion.
+
+"Their house is good, I gather," he went on. "There were some plates of
+it in the architectural journals. Just how good he doesn't know, I
+suppose--and never will."
+
+"I found him fairly appreciative of it."
+
+"Possibly--as a financial achievement brought about by his own money."
+
+"He's learning some of its good points," I declared.
+
+"There was some talk of having Albert there, just before they went off
+to the Yellowstone." He frowned. "Well, this can't go on so many more
+years, now."
+
+I did not quite get Raymond's attitude. He did not want the boy with him
+at home. He did not want to meet any extra expenses--and Mrs. McComas
+was assuredly paying Albert's way through mid-summer, as well as
+eternally buying him clothes. I think that what Raymond wanted--and
+wanted but rather weakly--was his own will, whether there was any
+advantage in it or not, and wanted that will without payments, charges,
+costs.
+
+I disliked his grudging way, or rather, his balking way, as regarded a
+recognition of the liberality of his former wife's husband--for that was
+what it came to.
+
+I returned his prospectus. "I'll look this up. How about that company in
+Montana?" I continued.
+
+"They've passed a dividend. I was counting on something from that
+quarter."
+
+"And how about the factory in Iowa?"
+
+"That will bring me something next year."
+
+"Well," I said, doubling back to the matter that had brought him in,
+"I'll inquire about this and let you know."
+
+In the course of a few days I called on McComas. Others were calling.
+Others were always calling. If I wanted to see him I should have to
+wait. I had expected to wait. I waited.
+
+When I was finally admitted, he rose and came halfway through his
+splendors of upholstery to give me an Olympian greeting.
+
+"It's brass tacks," I said. "Three minutes will do."
+
+"Four, if you like."
+
+"Three. Frankly, very frankly, is this a thing"--here I used the large
+page of ornamental letter-press as word-saver--"is this a thing for an
+ordinary investor?"
+
+"Ordinary investor"--that is what I called Raymond. Perhaps I flattered
+him unduly.
+
+"Why," responded McComas, with a grimace, "it's a right enough thing for
+the right man--or men. Several of us expect to do pretty well out of
+it."
+
+"'Several'? How about the rank outsider?"
+
+"Anybody that _you_ know sniffing?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Well--Prince."
+
+"H'm." Johnny pondered; became magnanimous. "Well, it ain't for him.
+Pull his nose away. I don't want his money."
+
+He knew what he had taken. He may have had a prescience of what he was
+yet to take. He could afford an interim of generosity.
+
+
+V
+
+A year or so went on, and we met the McComases at a horse-show. Once
+more it had become distinguished to have horses, and to exhibit them--in
+the right place. Althea was with her parents; so was the survivor of the
+stalwart twins.
+
+Johnny had taken the blow hard. That a son of his, one so strong and
+robust, a youth on whom so much time and thought and care and money had
+been lavished to fit him for the world, should go down and go out (and
+in such a sudden, trivial fashion)--oh, it was more than he felt he
+could endure. But he was built on a broad plan; his nature, when the
+test came, opened a wide door to the assimilation of experiences and
+offered a wide margin for adjustment to their jars. His other son, the
+full equal of the lost one, still survived and was present to-day; and
+Johnny, grandly reconciled, was himself again.
+
+Althea had taken the interval to make sure about her hair-ribbon and her
+skirts. The ribbons had been pronounced outgrown and superfluous, and
+had been banished. The suitability of longer skirts had been felt, and
+had been acted upon. Althea was now almost a young lady, and a very
+pretty one.
+
+I say it without bitterness. The beauties of nature--those trifles that
+make the great differences--are indeed unequally distributed among human
+creatures. Not all girls are pretty; not all attractive; not all
+equipped to make their way. No.
+
+You will assume for yourselves the greenery of grass and trees, the slow
+cumuli in the afternoon sky, the lively, brightly dressed throngs on
+lawns and verandas, and the horses; yes, even those were present,
+somewhere or other.
+
+Gertrude McComas was of the crowd; suitably dressed (or, perhaps,
+attired), a little less spare than once, and somehow conveying the
+impression, if unobtrusively, that her presence was necessary for the
+completeness of the function. She was pleasant with Althea, who had a
+horse on her mind and a number on her back.
+
+Gertrude had returned from the North with Althea and Albert, a week
+before Albert's allotted time with her was up, so that they might all be
+a part of this occasion. Albert was now taller than his father, had
+begun to gather up a little assertiveness on reaching the end of his
+preparatory days, had taken his examinations, and was understood to be
+within a month or so of college.
+
+I cannot say that Althea's skirts, however much thought she had given
+them, were long to-day. The only skirts she wore were the skirts of her
+riding-coat. The rest of her was boots and trousers; and she carried a
+little quirt with which she flecked the dust from her nethers, now and
+again, rather smartly.
+
+Albert looked--obviously envious, and obviously perturbed. His various
+knockings from pillar to post had left him without horse and without
+horsemanship. And here was a young feminine (almost a relative, in a
+sense; well, was she, or was she not?) who was dressed as he (with some
+slight differences) might have been dressed, and who was doing (or was
+about to do) some of the things that he himself (as he was now keenly
+conscious) had always hankered to do.... How was he to take it all?--the
+difference, the likeness, the closeness, the distance....
+
+And we--my wife and I--became suddenly, poignantly, even bitterly aware
+that our Elsie, beside us in her tailor-made, had never been on a horse
+in her life--and was now perhaps too old to make a good beginning.
+
+After a little while Althea was carried away for her "entry" or "event,"
+or whatever they properly call it--for I am no sportsman. Some small
+section of the crowd interested itself about the same time--at least got
+between us and the proceedings. We saw little or nothing--just heads,
+hats and parasols. All I know is that, in a few moments, Althea
+reappeared--I think she had leaped something. Her father was by her
+side, vastly proud and happy. Her mother (as I shall say for short)
+arrived from somewhere, with a gratified smile. Her big brother
+presently drew up alongside on a polo-pony, and gave her a big,
+flat-handed pat in the middle of her placard, and a handsome young
+woman, who was pointed out to us as the wife he had married in February,
+during our fortnight at Miami, reached up to her bridle-hand and gave it
+a squeeze. And there was a deep fringe of miscellaneous friends,
+acquaintances and rivals.
+
+"What do you think of our daughter, now!" asked Johnny, loudly and
+generally, as he lifted Althea down. He looked about as if to sweep
+together the widest assemblage of praises and applause. Many flocked;
+many congratulated; but still further tribute must be levied. McComas
+caught sight of Albert. The young fellow stood on the edge of the thing,
+staring, embarrassed, shaken to his centre.
+
+"Here, you, Albert!" Johnny cried; "come over and shake hands with the
+winner!"
+
+And meanwhile, Raymond, off by himself somewhere or other, I suppose,
+may have been studying how in the world he was ever going to put Albert
+through Yale.
+
+
+VI
+
+Business once more!
+
+It ought to be barred. I get enough of it in my daily routine without
+having it intrude here. Business should do no more than provide the
+platform and the scenic background for the display of young love, hope
+and beauty. But here we have to deal with the affairs of a worried and
+incompetent man half way through his fifties.
+
+Raymond came in one morning, on my summons. His manner was depressed; it
+was becoming habitually so. I tried to cheer him with indifferent
+topics,--among them the horse-show, which I saw so unsatisfactorily and
+which I have described so inadequately. He had already heard about it
+from Albert, and he felt no relish for the friendliness Johnny McComas
+had displayed on that occasion.
+
+"Trying to get _him_, too?" was Raymond's comment.
+
+"Oh, I wouldn't quite say _that_...."
+
+"I have a letter from his mother. She wants to know about college."
+
+"Well, how _are_ things?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know; poor."
+
+"That Iowa company?"
+
+"Next year."
+
+"Again?"
+
+"Yes--next year; as usual."
+
+"Well, I have news for you."
+
+"Good?" he asked, picking up a little.
+
+"That depends on how you look at it. I have a buyer for your house."
+
+"Thank God!"
+
+"Don't hurry to thank God. Perhaps you will want to thank the Devil."
+
+Raymond's face fell. "You don't mean that _he_--on top of everything
+else--has come forward to--?"
+
+"My friend! my friend! It isn't that at all. 'He' has nothing to do with
+it. Quite another party."
+
+And it was. A Mr. Gluckstein, a sort of impresario made suddenly rich by
+a few seasons with fiddlers and prima donnas, was the man. He was
+willing, he said,--and I paid the news out as evenly and considerately
+as I could,--he was willing to take the house and assume the
+mortgage--but he asked a bonus of five thousand dollars for doing it.
+
+"The scoundrel!" groaned Raymond, his face twisted by contemptuous rage.
+"The impudent scoundrel!"
+
+"Possibly so. But that is his offer--and the only one. And it is his
+best."
+
+Raymond sat with his eyes on the floor. He was afraid to let me see his
+face. He hated the house--it was an incubus, a millstone; but--
+
+He visibly despaired. "What shall I do about Albert's college, now?" he
+muttered presently.
+
+He seemed to have passed at a bound beyond the stage of sale and
+transfer. The odious property was off his hands--and every hope of a
+spare dollar had gone with it.
+
+"His mother writes--" began Raymond.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"She tells me--Well, her father died last month, it seems, and she is
+expecting something out of his estate...."
+
+"Estate? Is there one?"
+
+"Who can say? A man in that business! There might be something; there
+might be nothing or less. And it might take a year or more to get it."
+
+"And if there is anything?"
+
+"She says she will look after Albert's first year or two. I was about to
+refuse, but I expect I shall have to listen now."
+
+He was silent. Then he broke out:--
+
+"But there won't be. That old woman with her water-waves and her
+wrinkles is still hanging on; even if there should be anything, she
+would be the one to get most of it. I know her--she would snatch it
+all!"
+
+"Listen, Raymond," I said; "you had better let _me_ help you here."
+
+"I don't want you to. There must be some way to manage."
+
+He fell into thought.
+
+"I doubt if she can do anything, herself. Whatever she did would come
+through him in the end. You say he likes Albert?" He was silent again.
+"I don't want to meet either of them--but I would about as soon meet him
+as her."
+
+I saw that he was nerving himself for another _scène à faire_. Well, it
+would be less trying than the first one. If his sense of form, his
+_flair_ for fatalism, still persisted, ease was out of the question and
+no surrogate could serve.
+
+Perhaps, after all, there had been nothing between those two. Anyway, in
+the general eye the marriage had made everything right. She was
+accepted, certainly. And as certainly he had lived down, if he had ever
+possessed it, the reputation of a hapless husband.
+
+He wrote to her in a non-committal way--a letter which left loopholes,
+room for accommodation. Her reply suggested that he call at the bank;
+she would pass on the word. He told me he would try to do so. I saw the
+impudent concert-monger was to have his house.
+
+And so, one forenoon, at eleven or so, Raymond, after some
+self-drivings, reached the bank; by appointment, as he understood.
+Through the big doors; up the wide, balustraded stairway--it was the
+first time he had ever been in the place. He was well on the way to the
+broad, square landing, when some lively clerks or messengers, who had
+been springing along behind him, all at once slackened their pace and
+began to skirt the paneled marble walls. A number of prosperous
+middle-aged and elderly men were coming down together in a compact
+group. It seemed as if some directors' meeting was in progress--in
+progress from one office, or one building, to another. In the middle of
+the group was John W. McComas.
+
+He was absorbed, abstracted. Raymond, like some of the other up-farers,
+had gained the landing, and like them now stood a little to one side.
+McComas looked out at him with no particular expression and indeed with
+no markedness of attention.
+
+"How do you do?" he said indifferently.
+
+"I'm pretty well," said Raymond dispiritedly.
+
+"And that was all!" he reported next day in a high state of indignation.
+"Don't suppose I shall try it again!"
+
+But a careless Gertrude had failed to inform her husband of the
+appointment. She had been busy, or he had been away from home....
+
+"Go once more," I counseled, I pleaded.
+
+A note came to him from McComas--a decent, a civil. Come and talk things
+over--that was its purport. He went.
+
+McComas, as you can guess, was very bland, very expansive, very
+magnanimous (to his own sense). "I _like_ Albert!" he declared heartily.
+But he did little to cloak the fact that it was his own money which was
+to carry the boy through college.
+
+Raymond was in the depths for a month. After Gluckstein had got his deed
+for the house and Albert had packed his trunk for the East, he felt that
+now indeed he had lost wife, home and son.
+
+
+
+
+PART VIII
+
+I
+
+
+Before leaving his house for good and all, Raymond spent a dismal
+fortnight in going over old papers--out-of-date documents which once had
+interested his father and grandfather, books, diaries and memoranda
+which had occupied his own youthful days: the slowly deposited,
+encumbering sediment of three generations, long in one place. There were
+several faded agreements with the signature of the ineffable individual
+who had married into the family, had received a quit-claim to those
+suburban acres, and had then, at a point of stress, refused to give them
+back. There were sheaves of old receipted bills--among them one for the
+set of parlor furniture in the best (or the worst) style of the Second
+Empire. There were drafts of Raymond's early compositions--his first
+attempts at the essay and the short story; there was an ancient, heavily
+annotated Virgil (only six books), and there was a sheepskin algebra in
+which he had taken, by himself, a post-school course as a means of
+intellectual tonic, with extra problems dexterously worked out and
+inserted on bits of blue paper....
+
+"I filled the furnace seven times," he said to me, laconically.
+
+I myself felt the strain of it all. It is less wearing to move every two
+or three years, as most of us do, than to move but once--near the end of
+a long life, of a succession of lives.
+
+I never asked what Mr. Gluckstein thought of the orchestrion.
+
+Raymond went to live at a sort of private hotel. Here he read and wrote.
+He carried with him a set of little red guide-books, long, long since
+out of date, and he restudied Europe in the light of early memories. He
+also subscribed to a branch of a public library in the vicinity--a
+vicinity that seemed on the far edge of things. However, the tendency of
+the town has always been centrifugal. Many of our worthies, if they have
+held on to life long enough, have had to make the same disconcerting
+trek.
+
+From this retreat Raymond occasionally issued to concerts and
+picture-exhibitions. I do not know that he was greatly concerned for
+them; but they carried on a familiar tradition and gave employment still
+to a failing momentum.
+
+From this same retreat there would issue, about the Christmas season, a
+few watercolors on Italian subjects. If they were faint and feeble, I
+shall not say so. We ourselves have one of them--an indecisive view of
+the ruins in the Roman Forum. It is not quite the Forum I recall; but
+then, as we know, the Roman Forum, for the past half-century, has
+altered almost from year to year.
+
+Letters reached him occasionally from Albert the freshman. They might
+well have come from Albert the sophomore. Raymond showed me one of them
+on an evening when I had called to see him in his new quarters.
+
+He was comfortable enough and snug. On the walls and shelves were books
+and pictures that I remembered seeing in his boyhood bedroom.
+
+"I like it here," he said emphatically. And in truth it was the den of a
+born bachelor--one who had discovered himself too late.
+
+Well, Raymond passed me Albert's letter. He showed it to me, not with
+pride, but (as was evident from the questioning eye he kept on my face)
+with a view to learning what I thought of it. He was asking a verdict,
+yet shrinking from it.
+
+Albert was rather cocky; also, rather restless--I wondered if he would
+last to _be_ a sophomore. And he displayed little of the consideration
+due a father. Clearly, Raymond, as a parent, had been weighed and found
+wanting. Albert's ideal stood high in another quarter, and his life's
+ambition might soon drive him in a direction the reverse of academic.
+
+"How does it strike you?" asked Raymond, as I sat mulling over Albert's
+sheets.
+
+I searched my mind for some non-committal response.
+
+"Well," Raymond burst out, "he needn't respect _me_ if he doesn't admire
+_him_!"
+
+
+II
+
+Albert's response to McComas at the horse-show had not been noticeably
+prompt or adroit, but he cast about manfully for words and presently was
+able to voice his appreciation of Althea's feat (as it was regarded) and
+to congratulate her upon it. Johnny McComas was not at all displeased.
+Albert had not been light-handed and graceful, but he developed (under
+this sudden stress) a sturdy, downright mode of speech which showed
+sincerity if not dexterity. The square-standing, straight-speaking
+farm-lad--straight-speaking, if none too ready--was sounding an
+atavistic note caught from his great-grandfather back in York State.
+
+"Stuff in him!" commented Johnny. "It's a wonder, but there is. Must be
+his mother."
+
+Albert made no particular impression, however, on Althea herself. A
+dozen other young fellows had been more demonstrative and more fluent.
+He simply slid over the surface of her mind and fell away again. She had
+known him--intermittently--for years as a somewhat inexpressive boy;
+now, as a potential gallant, he was negligible, as compared with others.
+But Albert, speaking in a sense either specific or general, did not mean
+to remain negligible.
+
+He soon forgot most of the details of the day at the horse-show. He had
+hardly a greater affinity for sport than his father had had. He began
+his sophomore year with no interest in athletics. The compulsory
+gymnasium-work bored him. He made no single team--put forth not the
+least effort to make one. The football crowd, the baseball crowd, even
+the tennis crowd, gave him up and left him alone.
+
+Yet his bodily energies and his mental ambitions were waxing daily; his
+passions too. There must be an outlet for all this vigor--business, or
+matrimony, or war. In one short twelvemonth he compassed all three.
+
+By the end of Albert's second year, the day had come when a
+self-respecting young man of fortune and position found it hard if he
+must confess: "I have taken all yet given nothing." The Great War waged
+more furiously than ever, and came more close. The country had first
+said, "You may," and, later, "You must." Albert did not wait for the
+"must." He closed his year a month or so in advance--as he had done once
+before--and enrolled in a college-unit for service abroad.
+
+Raymond gave his consent--a matter of form, a futility. In fact, Albert
+enrolled first and asked (or advised) later. His mother, of a mixed
+mind, would have interposed an objection. McComas hushed her down. "Let
+him go. He has the makings of a man. Don't cut off his best chance."
+
+McComas had a right to speak. Tom McComas was going too, and going with
+his father's warm approval. If he could leave a young wife and a
+three-year-old boy, need a young bachelor student be held back?
+
+Albert came West for a good-bye. His father held his hand and gave him a
+long scrutiny--part of the time with eyes wide open, part of the time
+with eyes closed to a fine, inquiring, studious line. But he never saw
+what there was to see. In his own body there was not one drop of martial
+blood; in his being not an iota of the bellicose spirit. Why men fight,
+even why boys fight--all this had been a mystery which he must take on
+faith, with little help from the fisticuffs and brawls of school-days,
+or even from the gigantic, agonizing closing-in of whole peoples, now
+under way.
+
+Yet Albert understood, and meant to take his share.
+
+Who, indeed, as Raymond had once asked petulantly, could know what a boy
+was going to be?
+
+When Althea saw Albert in khaki, she _saw_ him: this time no
+indifference, no fusing him with the crowd, no letting him fade away
+unnoticed. If he had shaken before her on her hurdle-taker, she now
+shook before him in his brown regimentals. It was as if, in an instant, he
+had bolted from their familiar--their sometimes over-familiar--atmosphere.
+He confused, he perturbed her: he was so like, yet so different; so close,
+yet so remote. Was he a relative, of sorts--a relative in some loose
+sense; or was he a strange young hero, with his face set toward yet
+stranger scenes...?
+
+"Come," said her father, who was close by, between the horse-block and
+the syringa-bushes, "Albert isn't the only soldier on the battle-field.
+Look at Tom, here!"
+
+Althea turned her eyes dutifully toward her stalwart brother, who
+humorously put up his stiffened fingers to the stiff brim of his hat;
+and then she looked back at Albert.
+
+
+III
+
+McComas's bank, like others, put its office-machinery at the disposal of
+the Government, when the first war-loan was in the making. It seemed a
+small matter, at the beginning, but administrative organization was
+taxed and clerical labors piled up hugely as the big, slow event moved
+along through its various stages. This work in itself came almost to
+seem an adequate contribution to the cause; surely in the mere
+percentage of interest offered there was little to appeal to the
+financial public, except perhaps the depositors of savings banks.
+McComas himself felt no promptings to subscribe to this loan; but his
+directors thought that a reasonable degree of participation was
+"indicated." The bank's name went down, with the names of some others;
+and the clerks who had been working over hours on the new and exacting
+minutiæ of the undertaking were given a chance to divert their savings
+toward the novel securities. The bank displayed the Nation's flag, and
+the flags of some of the allies. It all made a busy corner. McComas
+thought of his son in khaki, and felt himself warming daily as a
+patriot.
+
+"We can do them up," he declared. The war, with him, was still largely a
+matter of financial pressure. The pressure, even if exerted at long
+range, was bound to tell. Many of "our boys" would never get "over
+there" at all. They were learning how to safeguard our country's future
+within our country itself.
+
+His wife, who had been flitting from veranda to veranda in their
+pleasant suburban environment, and been doing, with other ladies of her
+circle, some desultory work for the wounded soldiers of the future, now
+came down to the centre of the town and took up the work in good
+earnest. She saw Tom McComas as a seasoned adult who could look after
+himself, but her own Albert was still a boy. It was easy to see him
+freezing, soaking, falling, lying in distress. She busied herself behind
+a great plate-glass window on a frequented thoroughfare--a window heaped
+with battered helmets and emptied shells that drew the idle curiosity or
+the poignant interest of the passer-by. Bandages, sweaters, iodine-tubes
+filled her thoughts and her hands. And Althea, in company with several
+sprightly and entertaining young girls of her own set, began to pick up
+some elementary notions in nursing.
+
+"Why, it's the most delightfully absorbing thing I've ever done!" she
+declared. A new world was dawning--a red world that not all of us have
+been fated to meet so young.
+
+Raymond Prince saw all these preparations and took them as a spectacle.
+He was now frankly but an onlooker in life, and he gazed at big things
+from their far rim. He had no spare funds to put into federal hands, and
+felt by no means able to afford the conversion of any of his few
+remaining investments with a loss of nearly half his present returns. He
+viewed a patriotic parade or two from the curbstone and attended now
+and then some patriotic meeting in the public parks--a flag-raising, for
+example. On these occasions he preferred to stand at some remove, so
+that it would be unnecessary to raise his hat: the requirement of a
+formal salute made him distressingly self-conscious. Yet he was
+displeased if other men, no nearer, failed to lift theirs; and he would
+be indignant when young fellows, engaged in games near by, gave the
+exercises no heed at all.
+
+In one of the parades the flag of France went by. This was a picturesque
+and semi-exotic event; it stirred some memories of early days abroad,
+and Raymond, with an effort, did, stiffly and with an obvious (even an
+obtrusive) self-consciousness, manage to get off his hat. A highly vocal
+young man alongside looked at this cold and creaking manoeuvre with
+disapproval, even disgust.
+
+"Can't you holler?" he asked.
+
+No, Raymond could not "holler." The dead hand of conscious propriety was
+upon him, checking any momentum that might lead to a spontaneous
+expression of patriotic feeling. The generous human juices could not
+run--could not even get started. When he said good-bye to Albert, it was
+not as to a son, nor even to a friend's son. Albert himself might have
+objected to any emotional expression that was too clearly to be seen;
+but he would have welcomed one which, cloaked in an unembarrassing
+obscurity, might at least have been felt. Johnny McComas frankly let
+himself "go," not only with Tom, but with Albert too. Albert could not
+but think within himself that it was all somewhat overdone; he was a bit
+abashed, even if not quite shamefaced. But the recollection of Johnny's
+warm hand-clasp and vibrant voice sometimes came to comfort him, in camp
+across the water, at times when the picture of his own father's chill
+adieux brought little aid.
+
+
+IV
+
+A few brief months ended the foreign service of both our young men.
+Albert came home invalided, and Tom McComas along with others, lay dead
+between the opposing lines of trenches. His father would not, at first,
+credit the news. His son's very strength and vigor had helped build up
+his own exuberant optimism. It simply could not be; his son, his only
+remaining son, a happy husband, a gratified parent.... But the truth
+bore in, as the truth will, and McComas had his days of
+rebellious--almost of blasphemous--protest. The proud monument at
+Roselands was taking a cruel toll. His other son was commemorated on the
+third side of its base; but though a fresh unfrayed flag waved for
+months over turf below which no one lay, it was long before that great
+granite block came to betray to the world this latest and cruelest
+bereavement.
+
+Albert, whose injuries had made him appear as likely to be a useless
+piece on the board for longer than the army surgeons thought worth
+while, was sent back home and made his convalescence under the care of
+his mother; within her house, indeed--for his father had no quarters to
+offer him. Among McComas's flower-beds and garden-paths he enjoyed the
+ministrations of a physician other and better than any that practices on
+those fields of hate--one who complemented the prosaic physical cares
+required for the body with an affluent stream of healing directed toward
+both mind and heart. He had come back to be a hero to Althea, with
+evidences of his heroism graved on his own bruised form.
+
+"Hasn't he been wonderful!" said Althea to her girl friends; and Albert
+volunteered few concrete facts that might qualify or detract from her
+ideal.
+
+Those few months comprised his contribution to the cause. He mended more
+rapidly than might have been expected, and soon began to feel the
+resurgence of those belligerencies which are proper to the nature of the
+healthy young male. But his belligerencies were not at all militaristic.
+He had seen war at short range, knew what it was, and desired it no
+more. He meant to let loose his energies, as soon as might be, in that
+other warfare, business; it would be after the manner of a
+great-grandfather of whom a tradition persisted, and after the close
+pattern of a McComas still before his eyes. A hero, if they wished; but
+a hero with money in his pocket.
+
+Meanwhile, McComas looked at his grandson and writhed. So many openings,
+so many things to be done; yet what future aid had he to count on for
+carrying along his line and for reaping the opportunities in his field?
+A child of four, in rompers, pushing a little wheelbarrow of pebbles
+along garden-paths. The years dragged. It was all too great an irony.
+
+He sent for Albert. Albert still limped a little, but it was not to be
+for long.
+
+"You've done enough for your country," he declared with blunt emphasis.
+"Now do something for me. You're almost well?"
+
+"I think so."
+
+"You want to pitch in?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"You want to amount to something?" continued McComas, pausing on the
+edge of an invidious bit of characterization.
+
+"Of course."
+
+"You would like to come with me?"
+
+"Yes." Surely his own father could not help him to a future.
+
+"Well, take your choice. What do you want? Bank?"
+
+But Albert had heard something about banks. Bank clerks, in these
+close-knit days, when anybody who fell out of the lock-step was lost,
+were but a sort of financial militia. Even if he were pushed along with
+the friendliest zeal, it might be years before he reached the place and
+the end desired. Nor had he much more fondness for growing up under the
+eye of McComas than under that of his own father.
+
+"Bank?" repeated McComas.
+
+"No."
+
+McComas grinned. It was the grin he used when greatly pleased.
+
+"One of those Western concerns?"
+
+"Yes," said Albert; "send me West."
+
+When Raymond heard that Albert had cast in his lot with McComas and
+meant soon to leave for Colorado, he winced. Albert, to him, was still a
+boy, and this term in the West but another kind of schooling. "Just as
+his mother tried to influence him before," said Raymond to me bitterly,
+"so McComas will influence him now." And I could not deny that McComas
+had the whip hand. The unintermittency of business correspondence, the
+cogency of a place on the payroll....
+
+No, it was not to be denied that Raymond had lost Albert finally.
+
+And Althea went to the train, to see him off--as to another war.
+
+
+V
+
+"Finally"--perhaps I have used the word too soon.
+
+I dropped in on Raymond, one evening, at his private hotel. It was about
+four months after Albert's departure for the West. His quarters seemed
+as snugly comfortable as ever, and as completely adapted to his
+ultimately discovered personality and its peculiar requirements. Raymond
+master of a big house! Raymond leading a public life!
+
+But he himself was perturbed. It was a letter from Albert--it was two or
+three letters, in fact.
+
+"He says he is going to marry her."
+
+"Her?"
+
+"Althea. Althea McComas."
+
+Albert, in the West, had done well. He had taken hold immediately,
+decisively. The initiative which would never have developed under his
+father had been liberated during his war service and was now mounting to
+a still higher pitch among the mountains.
+
+"He is going to do," McComas had told me, after the second month. "He is
+a wonder," he had said, later.
+
+Be that as it may. McComas was doubtless inclined to the favorable view.
+He had determined in advance that Albert was to succeed. Albert was
+meeting, successfully, known expectations of success--as a young man
+may.
+
+"He started so well," said his father. "And now...."
+
+"And now?"
+
+"Now he wants to marry the daughter of a stable-boy!"
+
+"Raymond," I said; "drop the 'stable-boy.' That was never true; and if
+it were it would have no relevancy here and now."
+
+"I should say not! Why, Albert--"
+
+"You have told him? He knows your--He knows the--the legend?"
+
+"He does. And as you see, it makes no difference to him."
+
+"Why should it? Why should he care for early matters that were over and
+past long years before he was born? He sees what he sees. He feels what
+he feels."
+
+"He feels McComas."
+
+"Why shouldn't he? Who wouldn't?"
+
+Raymond relapsed into a moody silence. I saw, presently, that he was
+trying to break from it. He had another consideration to offer.
+
+"And then," he began, "about--his mother. He must have
+understood--something. He must know--by now."
+
+"Know?" I returned. "If he does, he has the advantage over all the rest
+of us. _I_ don't 'know.' _You_ don't 'know.' Neither does anybody else.
+Another old matter--as well rectified as society and its usages can
+manage, and best left alone."
+
+"Well, it's--it's indelicate. Albert ought to feel that."
+
+"Raymond!" I protested. "We must leave it to the young to smooth over
+the rough old places and to salve the aching old sores. That's their
+great use and function."
+
+"Not Albert's," he said stubbornly. "I don't want him to do it, and I
+don't want it done in that way."
+
+Another silence. I could see that he was gathering force for still
+another objection.
+
+"It's a desertion," said the undying egoist. "It's a piece of treachery.
+It's a going over to the enemy."
+
+"If you mean McComas, Albert went over months ago. And he doesn't seem
+to have lost anything by doing so," I ventured to add.
+
+"This marriage would clinch it, would confirm it. I should lose him at
+last, and completely, just as I have lost--everything."
+
+"Raymond," I could scarcely keep from saying, "you deceive yourself. You
+have really never cared for Albert at all. The only concern here is your
+own pride--the futile working of a will that is too weak to get its own
+way."
+
+But I kept silence, and he continued the silence. Yet I felt that he
+was gathering force for the greatest objection of all.
+
+"I have heard them spoken of," he said, after a little, "as--as brother
+and sister. For them to marry! It's unseemly."
+
+"Raymond!" I protested again, with even more vigor than before. "Why
+must you say a thing like that?"
+
+"The same father and mother--now. Living together--going about together
+as members of one family.... They did, you know."
+
+"Yes, for a few weeks in the year. 'One family'? What is the mere label?
+Nothing. What is the real situation? Everything. Of blood-relationship
+not a trace. Why, even cousins marry--but here are two strains
+absolutely different.... Have you," I asked, "have you brought up this
+point with--Albert?"
+
+Raymond glanced at the letters.
+
+"You have! And he says what I say!"
+
+Raymond put the letters away.
+
+Albert had doubtless said much more--and said it with the vigor of
+indignant youth.
+
+
+VI
+
+At a wedding the father of the bridegroom need not be conspicuous--least
+of all when the wedding takes place in a church. He may avoid, better
+than at a home wedding, too close contact with the various units of the
+bridal party. In view of such considerations, Raymond Prince was able to
+be present, with discomfort minimized, at his son's marriage.
+
+We attended, too, of course. My wife has a woman's fondness for
+weddings--and so has our Elsie.
+
+It came in June. The church was _the_ church--the church with the elms
+and ash-trees around it, the triangular lawn with the hydrangeas and
+elderberry-bushes blossoming here and there, and the gardens and
+plantations of private wealth looking across from all sides; the church
+where everybody who is anybody gets married as a matter of course--at
+that time of year; the church which has plenty of room for limousines on
+both sides of its converging streets, and on a third cross-street close
+by; the church which has the popular and sympathetic rector, who has
+known you ever since you were a boy (or girl), the competent organist,
+and the valiant surpliced choir (valiant though small); the church
+which, under its broad squat tower and low spire, possesses, about its
+altar-rail, room for many palms and rubber-plants and for as many
+bridesmaids and ushers as the taste of the high contracting parties may
+require:--a space reached by a broad flight of six or seven steps, and
+wide enough for any deployment, high enough for the whole assemblage to
+see, and grand enough (with its steps and all) to make a considerable
+effect when the first notes of the Wedding March sound forth and the
+newly wedded couple walk down and out into married life.
+
+"Be married in your uniform!" Johnny McComas had said effusively.
+
+"Well, I'm not in the service, now...." replied Albert.
+
+"You have been, haven't you? Haven't you?" Johnny repeated, as if there
+could be two answers.
+
+"Why, I was only a private...." Albert submitted.
+
+"So were lots of other good fellows."
+
+"It's soiled," said Albert. "There's a stain on the shoulder."
+
+"All the better. We've done something for the country. Let those people
+know it."
+
+So Albert walked down the aisle in khaki.
+
+Althea was in white--my wife named the material expertly. She wore a
+long veil. There were flower-girls, too,--my wife knew their names.
+
+"She's the most beautiful bride I ever saw!" my wife declared. "This is
+the most beautiful wedding I ever attended!" She always says that.
+
+Johnny McComas was in white, too. As he stood beside the bridal pair he
+seemed almost too festive, too estival, too ebullient for this poor
+earth of ours. His wife, whose costume I will not describe and whose
+state of mind I shall not explore, showed a subdued sedateness--though a
+glad--which restored the balance.
+
+Raymond Prince saw the ceremony from one of the back pews. If he
+attended the out-of-door reception at the house, it must have been but
+briefly: I quite missed him there. For him the wedding proper had been
+less a ceremony than a parade. I can fancy how he resented the
+organist's grand outburst and the triumphal descent (undeniably
+effective) of the bridal party over those six or seven steps. Again he
+was an unregarded and negligible spectator. I presume he missed Johnny's
+hand in Albert's, and Johnny's pressure on Albert's shoulder--the one
+with the stain; and I hope he did. It was the hand of the stronger,
+taking possession. "My prop, my future mainstay!" said Johnny's action.
+
+And it was as an unregarded and negligible spectator--now his permanent
+rôle--that Raymond Prince took the slow train back to town.
+
+
+THE END
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The Riverside Press
+CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
+U · S · A
+
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of On the Stairs, by Henry B. Fuller
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: On the Stairs
+
+Author: Henry B. Fuller
+
+Release Date: May 26, 2007 [EBook #21613]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE STAIRS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<table style="margin: auto; border: black 1px solid; width: 400px;" summary=""><tr><td>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 240%; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 40px;">On the Stairs</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 120%; margin-bottom: 10px;">by</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 120%; margin-bottom: 10px;">Henry B. Fuller</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 80%; margin-bottom: 50px;">Author of <i>Lines Long and Short</i></p>
+<div style="text-align: center">
+<img src="images/illus-emb.png" alt="titlepage emblem"/>
+</div>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 100%; margin-top: 50px;">BOSTON AND NEW YORK</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 100%">HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 100%">The Riverside Press Cambridge</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 100%; margin-bottom: 40px;">1918</p>
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+
+<p style="text-align: center; font-size: smaller;">COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY HENRY B. FULLER<br />
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED<br />
+<i>Published March 1918</i></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+
+<p style="text-align: center">AUTHOR'S NOTE</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;">This
+volume may seem less a Novel than a Sketch of a Novel or a Study
+for a Novel. It might easily be amplified; but, like other recent work
+of mine, it was written in the conviction that story-telling, whatever
+form it take, can be done within limits narrower than those now
+generally employed.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+
+<!-- Table of Contents not present in original text.
+<h2 class="toc"><a name="Contents" id="Contents"></a>Contents</h2>
+<div class="smcap">
+<table border="0" width="500" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0"summary="Contents" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto">
+<col style="width:85%;" />
+<col style="width:15%;" />
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">PART I</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#PART_I_55">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">I</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#I_61">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">II</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#II_110">3</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">III</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#III_155">5</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">IV</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#IV_301">13</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">V</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#V_453">21</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">VI</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#VI_616">30</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">VII</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#VII_717">36</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">PART II</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#PART_II_807">41</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">I</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#I_814">41</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">II</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#II_916">46</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">III</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#III_1031">52</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">IV</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#IV_1154">59</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">V</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#V_1257">64</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">VI</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#VI_1368">70</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">PART III</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#PART_III_1493">77</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">I</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#I_1499">77</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">II</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#II_1614">83</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">III</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#III_1688">87</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">IV</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#IV_1804">91</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">V</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#V_1938">97</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">VI</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#VI_2025">102</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">PART IV</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#PART_IV_2139">109</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">I</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#I_2145">109</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">II</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#II_2265">115</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">III</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#III_2361">120</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">IV</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#IV_2488">127</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">V</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#V_2603">133</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">VI</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#VI_2698">138</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">PART V</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#PART_V_2735">141</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">I</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#I_2741">141</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">II</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#II_2926">150</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">III</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#III_3052">157</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">IV</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#IV_3178">164</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">V</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#V_3246">167</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">PART VI</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#PART_VI_3361">174</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">I</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#I_3367">174</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">II</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#II_3465">179</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">III</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#III_3561">184</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">IV</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#IV_3651">189</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">V</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#V_3728">192</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">VI</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#VI_3830">198</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">PART VII</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#PART_VII_3970">206</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">I</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#I_3976">206</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">II</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#II_4078">211</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">III</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#III_4189">217</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">IV</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#IV_4299">223</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">V</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#V_4429">228</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">VI</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#VI_4528">233</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">PART VIII</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#PART_VIII_4697">240</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">I</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#I_4703">240</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">II</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#II_4786">244</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">III</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#III_4874">248</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">IV</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#IV_4960">252</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">V</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#V_5064">257</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">VI</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#VI_5188">262</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+-->
+
+<h1>ON THE STAIRS</h1>
+
+
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a class="pagenum" title="1" name="page_1" id="page_1"></a>
+<a name="PART_I_55" id="PART_I_55"></a>
+<h2>PART I</h2>
+</div>
+
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="I_61" id="I_61"></a>
+<h2>I</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the year 1873&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>No, do not turn away from such an opening; I shall reach our own day
+within a paragraph or so.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1873, then, Johnny McComas was perfectly willing to stand to
+one side while Raymond Prince, surrounded by several of the fellows,
+came down, in his own negligent and self-assured way, the main stairway
+of Grant's Private Academy. For Johnny was newer there; Johnny was
+younger in this world by a year or two, at an age when a year or two
+makes a difference; and Johnny had but lately left behind what might be
+described as a condition of servitude. So Johnny yielded the right of
+way. He lowered his little snub nose by a few degrees, took some of the
+<a class="pagenum" title="2" name="page_2" id="page_2"></a>gay smile out of his twinkling blue eyes, and waited with an upward
+glance of friendly yet deferential sobriety until Raymond should have
+passed.</p>
+
+<p>"How are you, Johnny?" asked Raymond carelessly.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm pretty well," replied Johnny, in all modesty.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1916&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Yes, I told you we should reach our own times presently.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1916, then, Raymond Prince was standing to one side, whether
+willing or not, while John W. McComas, attended by several men who would
+make their cares his own, came down the big marble stairway of the
+Mid-Continent National Bank. Raymond, who had his cares too, would
+gladly have been included in the company (or, rather, have replaced it
+altogether); but he saw clearly that the time was not propitious.
+McComas looked out through this swarm of lesser people, half-saw Prince
+as in a mist, and gave him unsmilingly an abstracted half-bow.</p>
+
+<p><a class="pagenum" title="3" name="page_3" id="page_3"></a></p><p>"How do you do?" he mumbled impersonally.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm pretty well," returned Prince, in a toneless voice. But he was far
+from that, whether in mind or estate.</p>
+
+<p>Between these two dates and these two incidents lies most of my story.
+Be quite sure that I shall tell it in my own fashion.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="II_110" id="II_110"></a>
+<h2>II</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>First, however, this: I do not intend to magnify the Academy and its
+stairway. The Academy did very well in its day, and it happened to be
+within easy distance of James Prince's residence. If its big green doors
+were flanked on one side by a grocery and on the other by a laundry, and
+if its stairway was worn untidily by other feet than those of Dr.
+Grant's boys, I shall simply point out that this was all in the day of
+small things and that Fastidiousness was still upon her way. Should this
+not satisfy you, I will state that, in the year following, the Academy
+moved into other quarters: it lodged itself in a near-by private
+residence whose owner, in real estate, sensed down-heeled Decadence
+stealing that way a few years before any of his neighbors<a class="pagenum" title="4" name="page_4" id="page_4"></a> felt it, and
+who made his shifts accordingly. If even this does not satisfy you, I
+might sketch the entrance and stairway, somewhere in Massachusetts,
+which are to know the footfalls of Lawrence D. McComas, aged ten,
+grandson of Johnny; but such a step would perhaps take us too far afield
+as well as slightly into the future. One does not pass a lad through
+<i>that</i> gateway on the spur of the moment.</p>
+
+<p>Nor ought I to magnify, on the other hand, the marble stairway of the
+Mid-Continent. This was not one of the town's greater banks; and the
+stairway was at the disposal not only of the bank's client&egrave;le, but at
+that of sixteen tiers of tenants. However, it represented some advanced
+architect's ideal of grandeur, and it served to make the bank's
+president seem haughty when in truth he was only preoccupied.</p>
+
+<p>As you may now surmise, this story, even at its highest, will not throw
+millions on the habituated and indifferent air; nor, at its most
+distended, will it push the pride of life too far. That has been done
+already in sufficing<a class="pagenum" title="5" name="page_5" id="page_5"></a> measure by many others. Let us ride here an even
+keel and keep well within rule and reason.</p>
+
+<p>I am simply to tell you how, as the years moved on, John McComas climbed
+the stairs of life from the bottom to the top&mdash;or so, at least, he was
+commonly considered to have done; and how, through the same years,
+Raymond Prince passed slowly and reluctantly along the same stairs from
+top to bottom&mdash;or so his critics usually regarded his course. Nor
+without some color of justice, I presume that they will pass each other
+somewhere near the middle of my volume.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="III_155" id="III_155"></a>
+<h2>III</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>In 1873 James Prince was living in a small, choice residential district
+near the Lake. Its choiceness was great, but was not duly guarded. The
+very smallness of the neighborhood&mdash;a triumphant record of early
+fortunes&mdash;put it upon a precarious basis: there was all too slight a
+margin against encroachments. And, besides, the discovery came to be
+made, some years later, that it was upon<a class="pagenum" title="6" name="page_6" id="page_6"></a> the wrong side of the river
+altogether. But it held up well in 1873; and it continued to do so
+through the eighties. Perhaps it was not until the middle or later
+nineties that the real exodus began. Some of the early magnates had
+died; some had evaporated financially; others had come to perceive,
+either for themselves or through their children, that the road to social
+consideration now ran another way. In due course a congeries of bulky
+and grandiose edifices, built lavishly in the best taste of their own
+day, remained to stare vacantly at the infrequent passer-by, or to
+tremble before the imminent prospect of sinking to unworthy uses: odd,
+old-time megatheriums stranded ineptly in their mortgage-mud. But
+through the seventies the neighborhood held up its head and people came
+from far to see it.</p>
+
+<p>James Prince lived in one of these houses; and, around the corner, old
+Jehiel Prince lingered on in another.</p>
+
+<p>James was, of course, Raymond's father. Jehiel was his grandfather.
+Raymond, when we take him up, was at the age of thirteen.<a class="pagenum" title="7" name="page_7" id="page_7"></a> And Johnny
+McComas, if you care to know, was close on twelve.</p>
+
+<p>Jehiel Prince was of remote New England origin, and had come West by way
+of York State. He had been born somewhere between Utica and Rochester.
+He put up his house on no basis of domestic sociability; it was designed
+as a sort of monument to his personal success. He had not left the East
+to be a failure, or to remain inconspicuous. His contractor&mdash;or his
+architect, if one had been employed&mdash;had imagined a heavy, square affair
+of dull-red brick, with brown-stone trimmings in heavy courses. Items: a
+high basement, an undecorated mansard in slate; a big, clumsy pair of
+doors, set in the middle of all, at the top of a heavily balustraded
+flight of brown-stone steps; one vast window on the right of the doors
+to light the "parlor," and another like it, on the left, to light the
+"library": a fa&ccedil;ade reared before any allegiance to "periods," and in a
+style best denominated local or indigenous. Jehiel was called a
+capitalist and had a supplementary office in the high front basement;
+and here he was fretting<a class="pagenum" title="8" name="page_8" id="page_8"></a> by himself, off and on, in 1873; and here he
+continued to fret by himself, off and on, until 1880, when he fretted
+himself from earth. He was an unhappy man, with no essential mastery of
+life. His wife existed somewhere upstairs. They seldom spoke&mdash;indeed
+seldom met&mdash;unless papers to shift the units of a perplexed estate were
+up for consideration. Sometimes her relatives stole into the house to
+see her and hoped, with fearfulness, not to meet her husband in some
+passageway. He himself had plenty of relatives, by blood as well as by
+marriage; too many of these were rascals, and they kept him busy. The
+town, in the seventies, was at the adventurous, formative stage; almost
+everybody was leaving the gravel walks of Probity to take a short cut
+across the fair lawns of Success, and the social landscape was a good
+deal cut up and disfigured.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor relations!"&mdash;such was Jehiel's brief, scornful rating of the less
+capable among these supernumeraries. A poor relation represented, to
+him, the lowest form of animal life.<a class="pagenum" title="9" name="page_9" id="page_9"></a></p>
+
+<p>And when the chicane and intrigue of the more clever among them roused
+his indignation he would exclaim: "They're putting me through the
+smut-machine!"&mdash;an ignominious, exasperating treatment which he refused
+to undergo without loud protests. These protests often reduced his wife
+to trembling and to tears. At such times she might hide an elder
+sister&mdash;one on the pursuit of some slight dole&mdash;in a small back bedroom,
+far from sight and hearing.</p>
+
+<p>An ugly house, inhabited by unhappy people. Perhaps I should brighten
+things by bringing forward, just here, Elsie, Jehiel's beautiful
+granddaughter. But he had no granddaughter. We must let Elsie pass.</p>
+
+<p>Yet a fresh young shoot budding from a gnarled old trunk would afford a
+piquant contrast&mdash;has done so hundreds of times. Jehiel Prince
+undoubtedly <i>was</i> gnarled and old and tough; a charming granddaughter to
+cajole or wheedle him in the library, or to relax his indignant tension
+over young men during their summer attendance on swing or hammock, would
+have her uses. Yet a swing<a class="pagenum" title="10" name="page_10" id="page_10"></a> or a hammock would suggest, rather than the
+bleak stateliness of Jehiel's urban environment, some fair, remote
+domain with lawns and gardens; and Jehiel was far from possessing&mdash;or
+from wanting to possess&mdash;a country-house. Elsie may be revived, if
+necessary; but I can promise nothing. I rather think you have heard the
+last of her.</p>
+
+<p>James lived a few hundred yards from his father; his house bulked to
+much the same effect. It was another symmetrical, indigenous box&mdash;in
+stone, however, and not in brick. It had its mortgage. If this mortgage
+was ever paid up, another came later&mdash;a mortgage which passed through
+various renewals and which, as values were falling, was always renewed
+for a lesser amount and was always demanding ready money to meet the
+difference. In later years Raymond, with this formidable weight still
+pressing upon him, received finally an offer of relief and liberation;
+some prosperous upstart, with plans of his own, said he would chance the
+property, mortgage and all, if paid a substantial bonus for doing so.<a class="pagenum" title="11" name="page_11" id="page_11"></a></p>
+
+<p>The premises included a stable. I mention the stable on account of
+Johnny McComas. He lived in it. Downstairs, the landau and the two
+horses, and another horse, and a buggy and phaeton, and sometimes a cow;
+upstairs, Johnny and his father and mother. Johnny could look out
+through a crumpled dimity curtain across the back yard and could see his
+father freezing ice-cream on a Sunday forenoon on the back kitchen
+porch; and he could also look into one of Raymond's windows on the floor
+above.</p>
+
+<p>Every so often he would beg:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, father, let me do it,&mdash;please!"</p>
+
+<p>Then he would lose the double prospect and get, instead, a plate of
+vanilla with a tin spoon in it.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond, who had no mastering passion for games, sat a good deal in his
+room, sometimes at one of the side windows; occasionally at the back
+one, in which case Johnny was quite welcome to look. Raymond had more
+desks than one, and books everywhere on the walls between them. He had a
+strong bent toward study, and was even beginning<a class="pagenum" title="12" name="page_12" id="page_12"></a> to dip into literary
+composition. He studied when he might better have been at play, and he
+kept up his diary under a student lamp into all hours of the night. He
+had been reading lately about Paris, and he was piecing out the
+elementary instruction of the Academy by getting together a collection
+of French grammars and dictionaries. He had about decided that sometime
+he would go to live on that island in the Seine near Notre Dame.</p>
+
+<p>His father told him he was working too hard and too late&mdash;that it would
+hurt his health and probably injure his eyes. His mother made no comment
+and gave no advice. She was an invalid and thus had absorbing interests
+of her own. Raymond kept on reading and writing.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps I should begin to sketch, just about here, his awakening regard
+for some Gertrude or Adele, and his young rivalry with Johnny McComas
+for her favor; telling how Johnny won over Raymond the privilege of
+carrying her books to school, and how, in the end, he won Gertrude or
+Adele herself from Raymond, and married her. Fiddlesticks! Please put<a class="pagenum" title="13" name="page_13" id="page_13"></a>
+all such conventional procedures out of your head, and take what I am
+prepared to give you. The school was a boys' school. There was no
+Gertrude or Adele&mdash;as yet&mdash;any more than there was an Elsie. Raymond
+kept to his books and indulged in no juvenile philanderings. Forget all
+such foolish stereotypings of fancy.</p>
+
+<p>As for the romance and the rivalry: when that came, it came with a vast
+difference.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="IV_301" id="IV_301"></a>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Jehiel Prince was a capitalist. So was James: a capitalist, and the son
+of a capitalist. They had some interests in common, and others apart.
+There was a bank, and there were several large downtown business-blocks
+whose tenants required a lot of bookkeeping, and there was a horse-car
+line. There was a bus-line, too, between the railroad depots and the
+hotels. James destined Raymond for the bank. He would hardly go to
+college, but at seventeen or so would begin on the collection-register
+or some such matter; later he might come to be a receiving-teller;
+pretty<a class="pagenum" title="14" name="page_14" id="page_14"></a> soon he might rise to an apprehension of banking as a science
+and have a line as an official in the <i>Bankers' Gazette</i>. Beyond that he
+might go as far as he was able. James thought that, thus favored in
+early years, the boy might go far.</p>
+
+<p>But Raymond had just taken on Rome, and was finding it even more
+interesting than Paris. The Academy's professor of ancient history began
+to regard him as a prodigy. Then, somehow or other, Raymond got hold of
+Gregorovius, with his "City of Rome in the Middle Ages"&mdash;though his
+teacher did not know of this, and would have been sure to consider it an
+undesirable deviation from the straight and necessary path; and
+thenceforth the dozens of ordinary boys about him counted, I feel sure,
+for less than ever.</p>
+
+<p>Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put myself into the story
+as one of the characters. Then the many I's will no longer refer to the
+author named on the title-page, but will represent the direct
+participation&mdash;direct, even though inconspicuous&mdash;of a person whose
+title="15" name, status, and general<a class="pagenum" name="page_15" id="page_15"></a> nature will be made manifest, incidentally
+and gradually, as we proceed. You object that though one's status and
+general nature may be revealed "gradually," such can scarcely be the
+case as regards one's name? But if I tell you that my Christian name is,
+let us say, Oliver, and then intimate in some succeeding section that my
+surname is Ormsby, and then do not disclose my middle initial&mdash;which may
+be W&mdash;until the middle of the book (in some documentary connection,
+perhaps), shall I not be doing the thing "gradually"?</p>
+
+<p>Oliver W. Ormsby. H'm! I'm not so sure that I like it. Well, my name may
+turn out, after all, to be something quite different. And possibly I may
+be found to be without any middle initial whatever.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the method itself. You will find it pursued in many
+good novels and in many bad ones; with admirable discretion&mdash;to make an
+instance&mdash;in "The Way of All Flesh"; and the procedure may be humbly
+copied here. It will involve, of course, a rather close attendance on
+both Raymond<a class="pagenum" title="16" name="page_16" id="page_16"></a> and Johnny through a long term of years; but perhaps the
+difficulties involved&mdash;or, rather, the awkwardnesses&mdash;can be got round
+in one way or another.</p>
+
+<p>At the Academy we like Raymond well enough, on the whole&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>You see at once how the method applies: I make myself an attendant
+there, and I place my age midway between the ages of the other two.</p>
+
+<p>As I say, we liked Raymond well enough, yet did not quite feel that he
+coalesced. "Coalesced" was hardly the word we used&mdash;such verbal
+grandeurs were reserved for our "compositions"; but you know what I
+mean. Another point to be made clear without delay is this: that when
+Johnny appeared at the Academy, he had lately left behind him the
+previous condition of servitude involved in a lodgment above the landau,
+the phaeton, and sometimes the cow. His father and mother, as I saw them
+and remember them, appeared to be rather nice people. Perhaps they had
+lately come from some small country town and had not been able, at
+first, to realize<a class="pagenum" title="17" name="page_17" id="page_17"></a> themselves and their abilities to the best advantage
+in the city. Assuredly his father knew how to drive horses and to care
+for them; and he had an intuitive knack for safeguarding his
+self-respect. And Johnny's mother was perfectly competent to cook and to
+keep house&mdash;even above a stable&mdash;most neatly. If Johnny's curtain was
+rumpled, that was Johnny's own incorrigible fault. The window-sill was a
+wide one, and Johnny, I found, used it as a catch-all. He kept there a
+few boxes of "bugs," as we called his pinned-down specimens, and an
+album of postage-stamps that was always in a state of metamorphosis. He
+had some loose stamps too, and sometimes, late in the afternoon or on
+Saturdays, we "traded." Johnny's mother was likely to caution us about
+her freshly scrubbed floors, and sometimes gave me a cooky on my
+leaving. I never heard of Raymond's having been there.</p>
+
+<p>But presently the trading stopped, and the "bugs," however firmly pinned
+down, took their flight. Johnny's father and mother "moved"&mdash;that was
+the brief, unadorned,<a class="pagenum" title="18" name="page_18" id="page_18"></a> sufficing formula. It was all accepted as
+inevitable; hardly for a boy a little past twelve, like myself, to
+question the movements of Olympian elders; nor even, in fact, to feel an
+abiding interest in them when I had seen them but three or four times in
+all. I never speculated&mdash;never asked where they had come from; never
+considered the nature of their tenure (not wondering how much Johnny's
+father may have been paid for driving the two bays and washing the
+parlor and bedroom windows and milking the cow, when there was one, and
+not figuring the reduction in wages due to the renting value of the
+three or four small rooms they occupied); nor did I much concern myself
+as to whither they might have gone. Probably opportunity had opened up a
+more promising path. However, the path did not lead far; for Johnny, a
+month or two later, made his first appearance at the Academy, on the
+opening of the fall term. During the preceding year he had been going to
+a public school "across the tracks" and had played with a boisterous
+crowd in a big cindered yard.<a class="pagenum" title="19" name="page_19" id="page_19"></a></p>
+
+<p>Therefore, when Raymond, surrounded by half a dozen other boys, took
+occasion, on the stairs, to say:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"How are you, Johnny?"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>And Johnny, with his back to the wall of the landing, replied:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I'm pretty well,"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Johnny may have meant that, despite the novelty and the strangeness of
+his situation, he was very well, indeed; feeling, doubtless, that he was
+finally where he had a right to be and that his alert face was turned
+the proper way.</p>
+
+<p>The boys about Raymond were asking him to take part in a football game.
+It was not that Raymond was especially popular; but he could run. In
+that simple day football was football&mdash;principally a matter of running
+and of straightforward kicking; and Raymond could do both better than
+any other boy in the school. He could also outjump any of us&mdash;when he
+would take the trouble to try. In fact, his physical faculties were in
+his legs; his arms were nowhere. He was never able to throw either far
+or straight. Some of his early<a class="pagenum" title="20" name="page_20" id="page_20"></a> attempts at throwing were met with
+shouts of ridicule, and he never tried the thing further. If he fell
+upon the ill luck of finding a ball in his hands, he would toss it to
+somebody else with an air of facetious negligence. To stand, as Johnny
+McComas could stand, and throw a ball straight up for seventy-five feet
+and then catch it without stirring a foot from the spot where he was
+planted, would have been an utter impossibility for him. In fact,
+Raymond simply cultivated his obviously natural gifts; he never exerted
+himself systematically to make good any of his deficiencies. He was so
+as a boy; and he remained so always.</p>
+
+<p>In those early days we had no special playgrounds. We commonly used the
+streets. There was little traffic. Pedestrians took their chances on the
+sidewalks with leapfrog and the like, and we took ours, in turn, in the
+wide roadway with "pom-pom-peel-away" and similar games. Football,
+however, would take us to a vacant corner lot, some two streets away.
+Some absentee owner in the East was doubtless paying taxes on it with
+hopes of finally recouping himself<a class="pagenum" title="21" name="page_21" id="page_21"></a> through the unearned increment.
+Meanwhile it ran somewhat to rubbish and tin cans, to bare spots from
+which adjoining homemakers had removed irregular squares of turf, and to
+holes in the dry, brown earth where potatoes had been baked with a
+minimum of success and a maximum of wood ashes and acrid smoke. It was
+on the way to this frequented tract that Raymond carelessly let fall a
+word about Johnny McComas. Perhaps he need not have said that Johnny had
+lately been living above his father's stable&mdash;but he spoke without
+special animus. A few of the boys thought Johnny's intrusion odd, even
+cheeky; but most of them, employing the social assimilability of
+youth,&mdash;especially that of youth in the Middle West,&mdash;laid little stress
+upon it. Johnny made his place, in due time and on his own merits. Or
+shall I say, rather, by his own powers?</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="V_453" id="V_453"></a>
+<h2>V</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>You are not to suppose that while I was free to visit Johnny in the
+stable, I was not free to visit Raymond in the house. Though<a class="pagenum" title="22" name="page_22" id="page_22"></a> my people
+lived rather modestly on a side street, the interior of the Prince
+residence was not unknown to me. On one occasion Raymond took me up to
+his room so that I might hear some of his writings. He had been to
+Milwaukee or to Indianapolis, and had found himself moved to set down an
+account of his three days away from home. He led me through several big
+rooms downstairs before we got to his own particular quarters above. The
+furnishing of these rooms impressed me at the time; but I know, now,
+that they were heavy and clumsy when they were meant to be rich and
+massive, and were meretricious when they were meant to be elegant. It
+was all of the Second Empire, qualified by an erratic, exaggerated touch
+that was natively American. I am afraid I found it rather superb and was
+made uncomfortable&mdash;was even intimidated by it; all the more so that
+Raymond took it completely for granted. One room contained a big
+orchestrion with many pipes in tiers, like an organ's. On one occasion I
+heard it play the overture to "William Tell," and it managed<a class="pagenum" title="23" name="page_23" id="page_23"></a> the
+"Storm" very handily. There was a large, three-cornered piano in the
+same room&mdash;one of the sort I never could feel at home with; and this
+instrument, more than the other, I suppose, gave Raymond his futile and
+disadvantageous start toward music. Travel; art; anything but the bank.</p>
+
+<p>I have no idea at what time of day he introduced me into the house, but
+it was an hour at which the men, as well as the women, were at home. In
+one part or another of the hall I met his mother. She was dark and lean;
+without being tall, she looked gaunt. She seemed occupied with herself,
+as she moved out of one shadow into another, and she gave scant
+attention to a casual boy. Raymond was really no more hospitable than
+any young and growing organism must be; but perhaps she was thankful
+that it was only one boy, instead of three or four.</p>
+
+<p>In another room, somewhere on the first floor, I had a glimpse of his
+father. I remember him as a sedate man who did not insist. If he set a
+boy right, it was done but verbally; the boy was left to see the
+justness of<a class="pagenum" title="24" name="page_24" id="page_24"></a> the point and to act on it for himself. I gathered, later,
+that James Prince had done little, unaided, for himself; whatever he had
+accomplished had been in conjunction with other men&mdash;with his father,
+particularly; and when his father died, a few years later, he was the
+chief heir&mdash;and he never added much to what he had received. To him fell
+the property&mdash;and its worries. The worries, I surmise, were the greater
+part of it all. Everything has to be paid for, and James Prince's easily
+gained success was paid for, through the ensuing years, with
+considerable anxieties and perturbations.</p>
+
+<p>It was his father, I presume, who was with him as I passed the library
+door: a bent, gray man, with a square head and a yellow face. A third
+man was between them; a tall, dry, cold fellow with iron-gray beard and
+no mustache&mdash;a face in the old New England tradition. This man was, of
+course, their lawyer, and I judge that he gave them little comfort. I
+felt him as chill and slow, as enjoying the tying and untying of
+legalities with a stiff, clammy hand, and as unlikely to be hurried<a class="pagenum" title="25" name="page_25" id="page_25"></a> on
+account of any temperament possessed by himself or manifested by his
+clients. Fire, in a wide sweep, had overtaken the town a year or two
+before&mdash;a community owned by the Eastern seaboard and mortgaged to its
+eyebrows; and the Princes, as I learned years later, had been building
+extensively on borrowed capital just before the fire-doom came. Probably
+too great a part of the funds employed came from their own bank.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond, once the second floor was reached, showed me his desks and
+bookcases; also a new sort of pen which he had thought to be able to
+use, but which he had cast aside. And he offered to read me his account
+of the three days in Milwaukee, or wherever.</p>
+
+<p>"If you would like to hear...?" he said, with a sort of bashful
+determination.</p>
+
+<p>"Just as you please," I replied, patient then, as ever after, in the
+face of the arts.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing much seemed to have happened&mdash;nothing that I, at least, should
+have taken the trouble to set down; but a good part of his fifteen
+pages, as he read them, seemed interesting and even important. I suppose
+this<a class="pagenum" title="26" name="page_26" id="page_26"></a> came from the way he did it. As early as thirteen he had the
+knack; then, and always after, he enjoyed writing for its own sake. I
+feel sure that his father did not quite approve this taste. His
+grandfather, who had had a lesser education and felt an exaggerated
+respect for learning, may have had more patience. He talked for years
+about endowing some college, but never did it; when the time finally
+came, he was far too deep in his financial worries.</p>
+
+<p>James Prince, as I have noted, occasionally mentioned to Raymond his
+conviction that he was wasting his time with all this scribbling, and
+that so much work by artificial light was imperiling his eyesight.</p>
+
+<p>"What good is it all going to do you?" I once heard him ask. His tone
+was resigned, as if he had put the question several times before. "I
+don't think I'd write quite so much, if I were you."</p>
+
+<p>Raymond looked at him in silence. "Not write?" he seemed to say. "You
+might as well ask me not to breathe."</p>
+
+<p>"At least do it by daylight," his father<a class="pagenum" title="27" name="page_27" id="page_27"></a> suggested, or
+counseled,&mdash;scarcely urged. "You won't have any eyes at all by the time
+you're thirty."</p>
+
+<p>But Raymond liked his double student-lamp with green shades. He liked
+the quiet and retirement of late hours. I believe he liked even the
+smell and smear of the oil.</p>
+
+<p>His father spoke, as I have reported; but he never took away the pen or
+put the light out. The boy seemingly had too strong a "slant": a
+misfortune&mdash;or, at least, a disadvantage&mdash;which a concerned parent must
+somehow endure. But he did take a more decided tack later on: he never
+said a word about Raymond's going to college, and Raymond, as a fact,
+never went. He fed his own intellectual furnace, and fed it in his own
+way. He learned an immense number of useless and unrelated things. In
+time they came to cumber him. Perhaps college would have been better,
+after all.</p>
+
+<p>I never knew Raymond to show any affection for either of his parents;
+and he had no brothers and sisters. His father was an essentially kind,
+just man, and might have<a class="pagenum" title="28" name="page_28" id="page_28"></a> welcomed an occasional little manifestation of
+feeling. One day he told Raymond he had no heart. That was as far as
+emotion and the expression of emotion could carry him. Raymond's mother
+might have been kindly too, if she had not had herself. But a new
+doctor, a new remedy, a new draught from a new quarter&mdash;and her boy was
+instantly nowhere. Raymond's own position seemed to be that life in
+families was the ordained thing and was to be accepted. Well, this was
+the family ordained for him, and he would put up with it as best he
+might. But I kept on developing my own impression of him; and I see now
+just what that impression was going to be. Raymond, almost from the
+start, felt himself as an independent, detached, isolated individual,
+and he must have his little zone of quiet round him. Why in the world he
+should ever have married...!</p>
+
+<p>I never knew him to show gratitude for anything given him by his
+parents. On the other hand, I never heard him ask them for anything. He
+possessed none of the little ingenuities by which boys sometimes secure<a class="pagenum" title="29" name="page_29" id="page_29"></a>
+a bit of pocket-money. If he wanted anything, he went without it until
+it was offered. Frankly, he seldom had to wait long.</p>
+
+<p>Not that what came was always the right thing. He showed me his
+fountain-pen&mdash;one of the early half-failures&mdash;with some disdain. He
+always carried a number of things in his pocket, but never the pen. I
+myself tried it one day, and it went well enough; I should have been
+glad to have it for my own. But steel pens sufficed him; save once, when
+I saw him, in a high mood, experimenting fantastically with a quill one.</p>
+
+<p>He cared no more about his clothes than any of the rest of us. He never
+laid any real stress on them at any time of life. He developed early a
+notion of the sufficiency of interior furnishings; mere external
+upholstery never quite secured his interest. I heard his father once or
+twice complain of his looking careless and shabby. He waited with
+equanimity until his father could take him to the clothier's. He asked
+but one thing; that there should be no indulgence in sartorial<a class="pagenum" title="30" name="page_30" id="page_30"></a>
+novelties at his expense. And I never met a sedater taste in neckties.</p>
+
+<p>Three or four were hanging over the gas-jet, close to the window; they
+were all dark blues or grays, and most of them frayed. He expected a new
+one about Christmas; no hurry.</p>
+
+<p>From that window, across the back yard, we saw Johnny McComas, in a
+bright new red tie, busy at his own window. I waved my hand, and he
+waved back. Raymond looked at him, but made no special sign. Johnny was
+packing up his specimens and his postage-stamps, preparatory to the
+family hegira, though neither of us knew.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="VI_616" id="VI_616"></a>
+<h2>VI</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Raymond, who might have asked for almost anything, asked for nothing.
+Johnny, who was in position to ask for next to nothing, asked for almost
+everything. He was constantly teasing his parents, so far as my
+observation went; and his teasing was a form of criticism. "You are not
+doing the right thing by me"&mdash;such might have seemed his plaint.<a class="pagenum" title="31" name="page_31" id="page_31"></a> He was
+beginning to spread, to reach out: acquisitiveness and assimilativeness
+were to be his two watchwords. He hankered after the externalities; he
+wanted "things." If it was only a new stamp-album, he wanted it hard,
+and he said so. I shall not go so far as to say that he hectored his
+parents into sending him to our school. They were probably feeling, on
+their own account, that they had come to town for better things than
+they had been getting; and likely enough they met his demands halfway.
+There was usually a certain element of cheeriness in his nagging; but
+the cheeriness was quite secondary to the insistence.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come, mother!" or, "Oh, father, now!" was commonly Johnny's opening
+formula, employed with a smile, wheedling or protesting, as the occasion
+seemed to require.</p>
+
+<p>And, "Oh, well...!" was commonly the opening formula for the
+response&mdash;meaning, in completed form, "Well, if we must, we must."</p>
+
+<p>However, his parents were probably ready to meet with an open mind the
+scorings of<a class="pagenum" title="32" name="page_32" id="page_32"></a> their young, sole critic, thinking that his urgency might
+advance themselves no less than him. Well, in the autumn Johnny turned
+up at the Academy with an equipment that included everything approved
+and needed; and he was not long in letting us know that his father was
+manager in the supply-yard of a large firm of contractors and builders.
+His father had spent his earlier married years, it transpired, about the
+grounds of a small-town "depot," and knew a good deal in regard to
+lumber and cement.</p>
+
+<p>To most of us fathers were fathers and businesses were
+businesses&mdash;things to be accepted without comment or criticism. Our own
+youthfulness, and the social tone of the day and region, discouraged
+either. If I thought anything about it, I must have thought, as I think
+still, that it was a manly and satisfying matter to come to grips with
+the serviceable actualities of the building trades. Construction, in its
+various phases, still seems to me a more useful and more tonic concern
+than brokerage, for example, and similar forms of office life.<a class="pagenum" title="33" name="page_33" id="page_33"></a></p>
+
+<p>Johnny soon suggested that I go with him, some Saturday afternoon, to
+the "yard." I asked Raymond to join us. Raymond had just come on Gothic
+architecture and was studying its historical phases. He was picking up
+points about the English cathedrals and was making drawings to
+illustrate the development of buttresses and of window tracery. The yard
+was only a mile and a half away and the three of us frolicked loosely
+along the streets until we got there. Johnny's father was going about
+the place in an admirable pair of new blue overalls, and carried a
+thick, blunt pencil behind one ear. He showed an independent, breezy
+manner that had not been very marked before. He was loud and clear and
+authoritative, and kept a dozen or more stout fellows pretty busy. Once
+an elderly man in a high silk hat passed through the yard on his way to
+its little office. He stopped, and he and Johnny's father had some talk
+together. "Yes, sir!" said Johnny's father, with considerable emphasis
+and momentum. I enjoyed his "Yes, sir!" It was pleasant to find<a class="pagenum" title="34" name="page_34" id="page_34"></a> him so
+hearty and so well-mannered. He seemed to have escaped from something
+and to be glad of it. The man in the high hat hardly tried to stand up
+against him. As he turned away he smiled in a curious fashion; and I
+thought I heard him say to himself, as he moved back toward the door of
+the shed that had the sign "Office" on it: "I wonder whether I'm going
+to run him, or whether he's going to run me?"</p>
+
+<p>Johnny was all eyes for a tall stack of lathing in bundles and for a
+pile of sacks filled with hair from cows' hides, which last was to go
+into plaster. Raymond looked at these objects of interest&mdash;and at
+several others&mdash;with some degree of abstractedness. The English
+cathedrals, as I was told later, had not been plastered. Raymond had
+already developed some faculty for entertaining a concept freed from
+clogging and qualifying detail; and this faculty grew as he grew. He
+liked his ideal <i>net</i>; facts, practical facts, never had much charm for
+him. I remember his once saying, when about twenty-three, that he should
+have liked to be an architect, but that<a class="pagenum" title="35" name="page_35" id="page_35"></a> plumbing and speaking-tubes had
+turned him away. If he could have drawn fa&ccedil;ades and stopped there, I
+think he might have been quite happy and successful in the profession.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny pulled a lath for each of us out of one of the bundles, and we
+used them in our tour of the yard as alpenstocks. We found a glacier in
+the shape of a mortar bed and were using the laths to sound its depths,
+when Johnny's father appeared from round the corner of a lumber pile. He
+clapped his hands with a loud report.</p>
+
+<p>"Here! that won't do!" he said; and none of us thought it remotely
+possible to withstand him. "Enough for one morning," he added, and he
+waved both arms with a broad scoop to motion us toward the street gate.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, father, now!" began Johnny (with no smile at all), conscious of his
+position as host.</p>
+
+<p>"No more, to-day," said his father. "School six days a week would be
+about my idea."</p>
+
+<p>Raymond said nothing, but drew up his mouth to one side and himself led
+us toward the street.<a class="pagenum" title="36" name="page_36" id="page_36"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="VII_717" id="VII_717"></a>
+<h2>VII</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>I would not seem to stress either the saliency or the significance of
+these incidents. I simply put them down, after many years, just as they
+return to my memory. Memory is sporadic; memory is capricious; memory is
+inconsequent, sometimes forgetting the large thing to record the little.
+And memory may again prove itself all these, and more, if I attempt to
+rescue from the past a children's party.</p>
+
+<p>It was my young sister who "gave" it, as our expression was; parents in
+the background, providing the funds and engineering the mechanism, were
+not allowed greatly to count. The party was given for my sister's
+visitor, a little girl from some small interior town whose name (whether
+child's or town's) I have long since forgotten. Raymond was invited, of
+course;&mdash;"though he isn't very nice to us," as my sister ruefully
+observed; and some prompting toward fair play (as I vaguely termed it to
+myself) made me suggest Johnny McComas. He came.</p>
+
+<p>There must have been some twenty-five<a class="pagenum" title="37" name="page_37" id="page_37"></a> of us&mdash;all that our small house
+would hold. There were more games than dances; and the games were
+largely "kissing" games: "post-office," "clap-in, clap-out," "drop the
+handkerchief," and such-like innocent infantilities. Some of us thought
+ourselves too old for this sort of thing, and would willingly have left
+it to the younger children; but the eager lady from next door, who was
+"helping," insisted that we all take part. This is the place for the
+Gertrudes and the Adeles, and they were there in good measure, be-bowed
+and be-sashed and fluttering about (or romping about) flushed and happy.
+And this would be pre-eminently the place for Elsie, Jehiel's
+granddaughter and Raymond's cousin. Elsie would naturally be, in the
+general scheme, my childhood sweetheart; later, my fianc&eacute;e; and
+ultimately my wife. Such a relationship would help me, of course, to
+keep tab more easily on Raymond during the long course of his life. For
+instance, at this very party I see her doing a polka with Johnny
+McComas, while Raymond (who had been sent to dancing-school, but had
+steadfastly refused to "learn") views<a class="pagenum" title="38" name="page_38" id="page_38"></a> Johnny with a mixture of envy and
+contempt. A year or two later, I see Elsie seated in the twilight at the
+head of her grandfather's grandiose front steps, surrounded by boys of
+seventeen or eighteen, while Raymond, sent on some errand to his
+grandfather's house, picks his way through the crowd to say to himself,
+censoriously, in the vestibule: "Well, if I can't talk any better at
+that age than they do...!" Yes, Elsie would undeniably have been an
+aid; but she never existed, and we must dispense with her for once and
+for all.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond could always make himself difficult, and he usually did so at
+parties. To be difficult was to be choice, and to be choice was to be
+desirable. Therefore he got more of the kisses than he might have got
+otherwise&mdash;many more, in fact, than he cared for. But on this occasion a
+good part of his talent for making himself difficult was reserved until
+refreshment time. Most of the boys and girls had paired instinctively to
+make a prompt raid on the dining-room table, with Johnny McComas
+unabashedly to the fore; but Raymond lingered behind. My mother
+presently<a class="pagenum" title="39" name="page_39" id="page_39"></a> found him moping alone in the parlor, where he was looking
+with an over-emphatic care at the pictures.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Raymond dear! Why aren't you out with the others? Don't you want
+anything to eat?"</p>
+
+<p>No; Raymond didn't want anything.</p>
+
+<p>"But you do&mdash;of course you do. Come."</p>
+
+<p>Then Raymond, thus urged and escorted,&mdash;and, above all,
+individualized,&mdash;allowed himself to be led out to the refreshments; and,
+to do him justice, he ate as much and as happily as any one else. Johnny
+McComas, with his mouth full, and with Gertrudes and Adeles all around
+him, welcomed him with the high sign of jovial <i>camaraderie</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, Johnny took his full share of the ice-cream and macaroons; he got
+his full quota of letters from the "post-office"; the handkerchief was
+dropped behind him every third or fourth time, and he always caught the
+attentive little girl who was whisking away&mdash;if he wanted to. He even
+took a manful part in the dancing.</p>
+
+<p>"What a good schottische!" exclaimed one<a class="pagenum" title="40" name="page_40" id="page_40"></a> of the Adeles, as the
+industrious lady from next door, after a final bang, withdrew her hands
+from the keyboard. "And how well you dance!"</p>
+
+<p>"Gee!" exclaimed Johnny, with his most open-faced smile; "is that what
+you call it&mdash;a schottische? I never tried it before in my life!"</p>
+
+<p>"Learn by doing"&mdash;such might have been the motto of the town in those
+early, untutored days. And Johnny McComas emphatically made this motto
+his own.<a class="pagenum" title="41" name="page_41" id="page_41"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="PART_II_807" id="PART_II_807"></a>
+<h2>PART II</h2>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="I_814" id="I_814"></a>
+<h2>I</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Raymond went into the bank; not in due course, but rather more than a
+year later. After seeing some of his more advanced schoolfellows depart
+for Eastern colleges, after indulging a year of desultory study at home,
+and after passing a summer and autumn among the Wisconsin lakes, he was
+formally claimed by Finance. There was no Franciscan ardor to clasp her
+close, as others have clasped Poverty and Obedience. He began his
+business career, as men have been recommended to begin their matrimonial
+career, with a slight aversion. However, his aversion never brought him
+any future good.</p>
+
+<p>His year at home, so far as I could make out, was taken up largely with
+&aelig;sthetics and music. He read the "Seven Lamps of Architecture" and they
+lighted him along a road that led far, far from the constructional
+practicalities of the yard where we had spent a<a class="pagenum" title="42" name="page_42" id="page_42"></a> Saturday forenoon, some
+five years before. He had begun to collect books on the brickwork of
+Piacenza and Cremona, and these too led him farther along the general
+path of &aelig;stheticism. During our years at the Academy the town, after an
+unprecedentedly thorough sweep by fire, had been rebuilding itself; and
+on more than one Saturday forenoon of that period we had tramped
+together through the devastated district, rejoicing in the restorative
+activities on every hand and honestly admiring the fantasies and
+ingenuities of the "architects" of the day. But Raymond had now emerged
+from that innocent stage; summoning forth from some interior reservoir
+of taste an inspirational code of his own, he condemned these crudities
+and aberrations as severely as they probably deserved, and cultivated a
+confident belief that somewhere or other he was to find things which
+should square better with his likings and should respond more kindly to
+his mounting sensibilities.</p>
+
+<p>"Not going to cut us?" I once asked. "Just as we're picking up, too?"</p>
+
+<p>But Raymond looked abstractedly into the<a class="pagenum" title="43" name="page_43" id="page_43"></a> distance and undertook no
+definite reply. Possibly he had responded to Ruskin; more probably to
+some divine young sense of truth and fitness such as forms the natural
+endowment, by no means uncommon, of right-minded youth. Or it may be
+that he had simply reached the "critical" age, when Idealism calls the
+Daily Practicalities to its bar and delivers its harsh, imperious
+judgments; when it puts the world, if but for a few brief months, "where
+it belongs." His natural tendency toward generalization helped him
+here&mdash;helped, perhaps, too much. He passed judgment not only on his
+parents, whom he had been finding very unsatisfactory, and on most of
+his associates (myself, for example, whenever I happened to speak an
+appreciative word for his essentially admirable father), but on the
+community as such. A filmy visitant from Elsewhere had grazed his
+forehead and whispered in his ear that the town allotted to him by
+destiny was crude, alike in its deficiencies and in its affirmations,
+and that complete satisfaction for him lay altogether in another and
+riper quarter.<a class="pagenum" title="44" name="page_44" id="page_44"></a></p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was some such discontent as this that led him in the
+direction of musical composition&mdash;or toward attempts at it. He had no
+adequate preparation for it, nor, so far as I could perceive, any
+justificatory call. He had once taken a few terms on the piano; and he
+had on his shelves a few elementary works on harmony; and he had in his
+fingertips a certain limited knack for improvisation; and he had once
+sketched out, rather haltingly, a few simple songs. Yet, all the same,
+another reservoir, one of uncertain depth and capacity, was opening up
+for him at an age when opening-up was the continuing and dominating
+feature of one's days&mdash;a muse was stirring the vibrant air about him;
+and I gathered, after two or three certain visits to his house, that he
+had embarked on some composition or other of an ambitious and
+comprehensive nature: a cantata, possibly, or even some higher flight.
+As he had never domesticated musical theory and musical notation in his
+brain, most of his composing had to be carried on at the keyboard
+itself. The big piano in the big open drawing-room<a class="pagenum" title="45" name="page_45" id="page_45"></a> resounded with his
+strumming experiments in melody and harmony&mdash;sounds intelligible, often
+enough, to no ears but his own, and not always agreeable to them. I am
+sure he tried his parents' patience cruelly. His reiterated phrases and
+harmonizings were audible throughout a good part of the house. They did
+nothing toward relieving his mother's headaches, nothing toward raising
+his father's hopes that, pretty soon, he would come to grips with the
+elements of Loans and Discounts. Even the servants, setting the table,
+now and again closed the dining-room door.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Raymond, Raymond; <i>not</i> to-day!" his mother would sometimes plead.</p>
+
+<p>I presume that, during this period, the diary was still going on; and no
+one with such a gift for writing will stop short at a diary. In fact,
+Raymond tried his hand at a few short stories&mdash;still another muse was
+fluttering about his temples. Most of these stories came back; but a few
+of them got printed obscurely in mangled form, and the failure of the
+venturesome periodicals sometimes deprived<a class="pagenum" title="46" name="page_46" id="page_46"></a> him of the honorarium (as
+pay was then pompously called) which would have given the last
+convincing touch to his claims on authorship. He spoke of these stories
+freely enough to me, but disclaimed all attempts at poetry: short of
+that field, I believe, he really did stay his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Well, perhaps too many good fairies&mdash;good only to the pitch of
+velleity&mdash;buzzed and brushed, like muses, or pseudo-muses, about his
+brows. All this unsettled him&mdash;and sometimes annoyed his daily
+associates. But how, without these instinctive young passes at Art,
+could the unceasing, glamorous and needful rebirth of the world get
+itself accomplished?</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="II_916" id="II_916"></a>
+<h2>II</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>As for Johnny McComas, he found one year of our Academy enough. It was
+the getting in, not the staying in, that provoked his young powers. Our
+school, moreover, was explicitly classical in a day when the old
+classical ideal still ruled respected everywhere; and Johnny, much as he
+liked being with us<a class="pagenum" title="47" name="page_47" id="page_47"></a> and of us, could not see the world in terms of
+Latin paradigms. He wanted to be "doing something"; he wanted to be "in
+business." During the summer following his year at Dr. Grant's I heard
+of him as somebody's office-boy somewhere downtown, and then quite lost
+sight of him for the five years that succeeded.</p>
+
+<p>It occurred to me that Johnny must be doing just the right thing for
+himself; he would make the sort of office-boy that "business men" would
+contend for: easy to imagine the man&oelig;uvres, even the feuds, that
+would enliven business blocks in the downtown district for the
+possession of Johnny's confident smile and dashing, forthright way. I
+learned, in due season, that Johnny had cast in his lot with a
+real-estate operator, and had been cherished, through periods harried by
+competition, as a pearl of price.</p>
+
+<p>The city was emphatically still in the "real-estate" stage. Anybody
+arriving without profession or training straightway began to sell lots.
+Nothing lay more openly abundant than land; the town had but to
+propagate<a class="pagenum" title="48" name="page_48" id="page_48"></a> itself automatically over the wide prairies. The wild flowers
+waved only to welcome the surveyor's gang; and new home-seekers&mdash;in the
+jargon of the trade&mdash;were ever hurrying to rasp themselves upon the
+ragged edges of the outskirts.</p>
+
+<p>One Sunday morning in May, Raymond and I determined on an excursion to
+the country&mdash;or, at all events, to some of the remoter suburbs. The bank
+would not claim his thoughts for twenty-four hours, nor the law-school
+mine. We left the train at a promising point and prepared to scuffle
+over a half-mile splotched with vervain and yarrow, yet to bloom, toward
+a long, thin range of trees that seemed to mark the course of some small
+stream. But between us and that possible stream there soon developed
+much besides the sprinkling of prairie flowers. We began to notice
+rough-ploughed strips of land that seemed to mean streets for some new
+subdivision; piles of lumber, here and there, which should serve to
+realize the ideals of the "home-seekers"; and presently a gay,
+improvised little shack with a disproportionate<a class="pagenum" title="49" name="page_49" id="page_49"></a> sign to blazon the
+hopes and ambitions of a well-known firm back in town. And in the
+doorway of the shack stood Johnny McComas.</p>
+
+<p>He was as ruddy as ever, and his blue eyes were a bit sharper. He was
+slightly heavier than either of us, but no taller. He knew us as quickly
+as we knew him. For some reason he did not seem particularly glad to see
+us. He made the reason clear at once.</p>
+
+<p>"They had me out here last Sunday," he said, looking about his chaotic
+domain disparagingly, "and they say they may have to have me out here
+next Sunday&mdash;somebody's sick or missing. But they won't," he continued
+darkly. It was a threat, we felt&mdash;a threat that would make some
+presumptuous superior cower and conform. "I really belong at our branch
+in Dellwood Park, where there <i>is</i> something; not out here, beyond the
+last of everything." And he said more to indicate that his energies and
+abilities were temporarily going to waste.</p>
+
+<p>But having put himself right in his own eyes and in ours, he began to
+give rein to his<a class="pagenum" title="50" name="page_50" id="page_50"></a> fundamental good nature. Emerging from the cloud that
+was just now darkening his merits and his future, he asked, interestedly
+enough, what we ourselves were doing.</p>
+
+<p>I had to confess that I was still a student. Raymond mentioned briefly
+and reluctantly the bank. It was nothing to him that he, no less than
+Johnny, was now a man on a salary.</p>
+
+<p>"Bank, eh?" said Johnny. "That's good. We're thinking of starting a bank
+next year at our Dellwood branch. It's far enough in, and it's far
+enough out. Plenty of good little businesses all around there. And I'm
+going to make them let me have a hand in managing it."</p>
+
+<p>This warm ray of hope from the immediate future quite illumined Johnny.
+He told us genially about the prospects of the venture in the midst of
+which he was encamped, and ended by feigning us as a young bridal couple
+that had come out to look for a "home."</p>
+
+<p>"There may be one or two along pretty soon, if the day holds fair; so I
+might as well keep myself in practice." Then he jocularly let himself
+loose on transportation, and part<a class="pagenum" title="51" name="page_51" id="page_51"></a> payments down, and street
+improvements "in," and healthful country air for young children. He was
+very fluent and somewhat cynical, and turned the seamy side of his trade
+a little too clearly to view.</p>
+
+<p>He explained how the spring had been exceptionally wet in that
+region,&mdash;"which, after all, <i>is</i> low," he acknowledged,&mdash;and how his
+firm, by digging a few trenches in well-considered directions, had
+drained all its standing water to adjoining acres still lower, the
+property of a prospective rival. Recalling this smart trick made Johnny
+think better of the people who would maroon him for a succession of
+Sundays, and he became more genially communicative still.</p>
+
+<p>"That gray streak off to the west&mdash;if you can see it&mdash;is our water
+drying up. Better be drying there than here. You can put a solid foot on
+every yard of our ground to-day. Come along with me and I'll show you
+your cottage&mdash;<i>domus, a, um</i>. Not quite right? Well, no great matter."</p>
+
+<p>He pointed toward a yellow pile of two-by-fours, siding, and shingles.
+"Be sure you<a class="pagenum" title="52" name="page_52" id="page_52"></a> make your last payment before you find yourselves warped
+out of shape."</p>
+
+<p>We followed. Johnny seemed much more expert and worldly-wise than either
+of us. We held our innocent excursion in abeyance and bowed with a
+certain embarrassed awe to Johnny's demonstration of his aptitude for
+taking the world as it was and to his light-handed, care-free way of
+handling so serious a matter, to most men, as the founding of a home. As
+we continued our jaunt, I began to feel that I now liked Johnny a little
+less than I could have wished.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="III_1031" id="III_1031"></a>
+<h2>III</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>At about this time Raymond and I found ourselves members of a little
+circle that expressed itself chiefly through choral music. It was almost
+a neighborhood circle, and almost a self-made circle&mdash;it gradually
+evolved itself, with no special guidance or intention, until, finally,
+there it was. I, at that period, may have felt that it would verge on
+the presumptuous to pick and choose&mdash;to attempt consciously the
+fabrication<a class="pagenum" title="53" name="page_53" id="page_53"></a> of a social environment&mdash;and so I adopted with docility the
+one which presented itself. Raymond, on the other hand, may have felt
+that even the best which was available was unlikely to be good enough
+and have accepted fatalistically anything which could possibly be made
+to do.</p>
+
+<p>Just why our little group of a dozen or so should have united on a
+musical basis and have expressed itself in a weekly "sing" I might find
+it hard to explain. None of us fellows was especially blessed with a
+voice; and the various Gertrudes and Adeles that met with us were
+assuredly without any marked sanction to vocalize. Possibly the "sing"
+was the mere outcome of youthful exuberance and of the tendency of young
+and eager molecules to crystallize into what came, later, to be termed a
+"bunch."</p>
+
+<p>As for Raymond himself, he never sang at all. "Oh, come, Rayme; join
+in!" the other fellows would suggest&mdash;and suggest in vain.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm doing <i>my</i> part," he would return, giving the piano-stool a nearer
+hitch to the keyboard.<a class="pagenum" title="54" name="page_54" id="page_54"></a></p>
+
+<p>In fact, it was his specific function to preside at the Chickering, the
+Weber, the Steinway, according to the facilities offered by the
+particular home&mdash;for we moved about in rotation. This service, which we
+presently came to consider sufficient in itself, dispensed him from
+exhibiting his nature in so articulate a thing as actual vocal
+utterance. This he was quite opposed to: he would never even try a hymn
+in church. But he could accompany; he could improvise; he could
+modulate; he could transpose any simple air. The ease and readiness with
+which he did all this made less obvious&mdash;indeed, almost
+imperceptible&mdash;his fundamental unwillingness to abandon himself before
+others (especially if members of his own circle) to any manifestation
+that might be taxed with even a remote emotionalism. And yet, at that
+very time, he was laying the foundations of a claim to be that broad and
+vague thing called an "artist." Even as early as this, apparently, he
+was troubled by two contradictory impulses: he wanted to be an artist
+and give himself out; and he wanted to be a gentleman<a class="pagenum" title="55" name="page_55" id="page_55"></a> and hold himself
+in. An entangling, ruinous paradox.</p>
+
+<p>This comment on Raymond's musical inclinations and musical services may
+require a bit of shading: I believe that, after all, he never quite
+cared for music unless he had, in all literalness, his "hand" in it. He
+never liked to hear any one else play the piano, still less the violin;
+concerts of all sorts were likely to bore him; and he never really rose
+to an understanding of the more recondite and elaborate musical forms:
+to have his fingers on the keyboard&mdash;especially when improvising in a
+secure inarticulateness&mdash;was his great desideratum.</p>
+
+<p>In our little group we ran from seventeen to nineteen; some of us just
+finishing high school, others just on the edge of college, others (like
+myself) engaged in professional studies, and still others making a d&eacute;but
+in business as clerks. We sang mostly the innocent old songs, American
+or English, of an earlier day, and sometimes the decorous numbers from
+the self-respecting operetta recently established in London. No
+contributions<a class="pagenum" title="56" name="page_56" id="page_56"></a> from a new and dubious foreign element had yet come to
+cheapen our taste, to disturb our nervous systems, or to throw upon the
+negro, the Hawaiian, or the Argentine the onus of a crass passion that
+one was more desirous of expressing than of acknowledging. No; there was
+assuredly no excess of emotional life&mdash;whether good or bad&mdash;in the body
+of music we favored. Perhaps what our little circle really desired was
+simply good-fellowship and a high degree of harmonious clamor. Certainly
+all our doings, whether on Friday evening, or on the other forenoons,
+afternoons, and evenings of the week, were quite devoid of an
+embarrassing sex-consciousness. We "trained together," as the expression
+went&mdash;all the fellows and all the Gertrudes and Adeles&mdash;with no sense of
+<i>malaise</i>, and postponing, or setting aside, in the miraculous American
+fashion, all sexual considerations whatsoever.</p>
+
+<p>I hardly know just why I should have thought that Johnny McComas could
+be introduced successfully into this circle. Johnny, as he had told us
+in his suburb, had cut loose<a class="pagenum" title="57" name="page_57" id="page_57"></a> from his parents. He was now living on his
+own, in a neighborhood not far from ours&mdash;from his, as it had once been.
+One evening I ventured to bring him round. He developed an obstreperous
+baritone&mdash;it was the same voice, now more specifically in action, that I
+had first heard on the devastated prairie; and he made himself rather
+preponderant, whether he happened to know the song or not.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you're quite an addition!" commented one of the girls, in
+surprise&mdash;almost in consternation.</p>
+
+<p>"He is, indeed,&mdash;if he doesn't drown us all out!" muttered one of the
+fellows, behind his back.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, Johnny was vociferous&mdash;so long as the singing went on. But he
+developed, besides an obstreperous voice, an obstreperous interest in
+one of our Adeles&mdash;a piercing soprano who was our mainstay; and he
+showed some tendency to defeat the occasion by segregating her in a bay
+window. Segregation was the last of our aims, and Johnny did not quite
+please. Furthermore, Johnny seemed to feel himself among a lot of boys
+who were yet to<a class="pagenum" title="58" name="page_58" id="page_58"></a> make their "start," overlooking the fact that Raymond
+was in the bank, and ignorant of the further fact that one of our
+fellows was just beginning to be a salesman in a bond house. Johnny
+became violently communicative about the attractions of Dellwood Park
+and seemed to want to figure demonstratively in the eyes of Gertrude and
+Adele as an up-and-coming paladin of the business world. To most of us
+he seemed too self-assertive, too self-assured. He knew too clearly what
+he wanted, and showed it too clearly. Indeed it became apparent to me
+that while a boy of twelve may be accepted easily (at least in an early,
+simple society), a youth of eighteen cannot altogether escape the issues
+of caste. It was borne in on me presently that Johnny might as well have
+remained away. In fact&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"We shan't need him again," said the brother of the soprano to me, as
+the evening broke up.</p>
+
+<p>And Raymond himself remarked to me a day later:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Don't push him; he'll get along without your help."<a class="pagenum" title="59" name="page_59" id="page_59"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="IV_1154" id="IV_1154"></a>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>While the rankness of new elements in a new era had not penetrated our
+homes, it had begun to make itself manifest in public places. The town,
+within sixty years, had risen from a population of nearly <i>nil</i> to a
+population of some five or six hundred thousand; and it was only in due
+course, perhaps, that "vice" now raised its head and that a "criminal
+class" came into effective, unabashed functioning. It was to be many
+years before the better elements learned how to combine for an efficient
+opposition to impudent evils. A heterogeneous populace, newly arrived,
+was still willing to elect mayors of native blood; but one of these,
+elected and re&euml;lected to the town's lasting harm, might as well have
+been of the newer, and wholly exterior, tradition: a genial,
+loose-lipped demagogue who saw an opportunity to weld the miscellany of
+discrepant elements into a compact engine for the furtherance of his own
+coarse ambitions, and who allowed his supporters such a measure of
+license as was needed to make their support<a class="pagenum" title="60" name="page_60" id="page_60"></a> continuing. A shameless new
+quarter suddenly obtruded itself with an ugly emphasis; unclassifiables,
+male and female, began to assert and disport themselves more daringly
+than dreamt of heretofore; and many good citizens who would crowd the
+town forward to a population of a million and to a status undeniably
+metropolitan came to stroll these tawdry, noisy new streets with a
+curiosity of mind at once disturbed, titillated, and somehow gratified.
+Said some: "This is a new thing; do we quite like it?" Said others: "The
+town is certainly moving ahead; we don't know but that we do."</p>
+
+<p>Yes, a good many social observers set forth to see for themselves the
+new phenomena and to appraise the value of them in the coming political
+and social life of the community. Of course, many of these observers
+were too young and heedless to draw inferences from the sudden flood of
+new bars and bright lights and crass tunes and youthful creatures in
+short skirts who seemed not quite to know whether their proper element
+was the stage above or the range of tables below; in fact, these
+observers<a class="pagenum" title="61" name="page_61" id="page_61"></a> waived all attempt at speculative thought and became
+participants.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond and I had heard comments on the new developments from our
+elders; we were not without our own curiosity (though we had enough
+fastidiousness not to graze things very close, still less to wade into
+them very deep), and we decided one evening that we would look into two
+or three of these new and notable places of public entertainment.</p>
+
+<p>The first of them offered little. The second of them developed Johnny
+McComas. He sat at a table, talking too familiarly, or at least too
+forbearingly, with a rubicund, hard-faced man in shirt-sleeves standing
+at his elbow&mdash;probably the head of the place, or his first aide; and he
+was buying obviously unnecessary glasses of things for two of the young
+creatures in short skirts&mdash;Gertrudes and Adeles of that particular
+stratum, or Katies and Maggies, if preferred. Johnny sat there happy
+enough: an early example of the young business warrior diverting himself
+after the fray. Years afterward the scene came back to me when I met
+with a showy painting<a class="pagenum" title="62" name="page_62" id="page_62"></a> in the resonant new lobby of one of the greater
+hotels. It showed a terrace overlooking some placid Greek sea; the happy
+warrior standing ungirt and uncasqued, with a beautiful maiden of
+indeterminate status seated beside him; a graceful attendant holding a
+wreath above each happy and prosperous head, and a group of sandaled
+dancing-girls lightly footing it for the pleasure of the fortunate pair;
+the whole scene illuminated by the supreme, smiling self-satisfaction of
+the relaxed soldier amid the pipings of peace. So Johnny; he had earned
+the money and won the right to spend it in pleasure; his, too, the duty
+of refreshing himself for the strenuous morrow.</p>
+
+<p>He saw us and nodded. "Life!"&mdash;that was what he seemed to say. He made a
+feint to interest us in his companions; but they were poor things, as we
+knew, and as he must have known too. He left them without much regret
+and without much ceremony, and took us on to the next place.</p>
+
+<p>"It's life, isn't it?" he said in so many words.<a class="pagenum" title="63" name="page_63" id="page_63"></a></p>
+
+<p>Raymond's nose went up disdainfully. "Life!" Some such manifestations,
+if properly handled and framed, might be life in Paris, perhaps; but he
+could not accept them as life here at home, within a mile or two of his
+own study. What this evening offered him seemed to require a
+considerable touch of refining before it could reach acceptance. It was
+all only an imperfectly specious substitute for life, only a coarse
+parody on life. The town, he told me the next day, made him think of a
+pumpkin: it was big and sudden and coarse-textured. "I've had enough of
+it," he added; "I want something different, and something a lot better."</p>
+
+<p>Johnny, as I say, took us to the next place; we might not have known how
+to take ourselves there. Johnny honestly liked the glare, the noise, the
+uproarious music, and the human press both on the sidewalks and in the
+packed, panting interiors. I liked it all, too,&mdash;for once in a way; but
+I soon saw that, for Raymond, even once in a way was once too often. In
+this last place a girl with a hand too familiarly laid on his arm gave
+the finishing<a class="pagenum" title="64" name="page_64" id="page_64"></a> touch; it was a coarse, dingy little hand, with some
+tawdry rings. Raymond never liked close quarters; neither in those days,
+nor ever after, did he care to come decisively to grips with actual
+life. "Keep off!" was what his look said to the offender. The poor,
+puzzled little d&eacute;butante quickly stepped back, and we all regained the
+street. Raymond was trembling with embarrassment and vexation.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you were making a hit," said Johnny.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's get home," said Raymond to me, ignoring Johnny. "This is enough,
+and more than enough. What a hole this town is coming to be!"</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="V_1257" id="V_1257"></a>
+<h2>V</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Raymond stayed on at the bank, though&mdash;if one might judge by his words
+and actions&mdash;with no enthusiasm in the present and no hopefulness for
+the future. He did what he had to do, and did it fairly well; but there
+was no sign that he was looking forward, and there remained scant
+likelihood that he would meet the expectations of his father and
+grandfather<a class="pagenum" title="65" name="page_65" id="page_65"></a> by mastering the business. On the contrary, I think he
+actually set his face against it: he seemed as resolute not to learn
+banking as he had been resolute not to learn dancing. Professor Baltique
+and the little girls in light-soled shoes and bright-colored sashes had
+given him up in the waltz; and it looked as if James B. Prince must
+presently renounce all hope of his ever learning how to turn the
+collective spare cash of many depositors to profit. I recall the day
+when the chief little light of the dancing-class, after some moments of
+completely static tramplings by Raymond in the midst of the floor,
+suddenly began to pout and to frown, and then left him in the midst of
+the dance and of the company and came to tears before she could reach an
+elder sister by the side wall. Raymond accepted the incident without
+comment. If his demeanor expressed anything, it expressed his
+satisfaction at carrying a point.</p>
+
+<p>But he did not wait until a vexed and disappointed bank left him high
+and dry. Though he must have known that many young clerks in the office
+envied him his billet<a class="pagenum" title="66" name="page_66" id="page_66"></a> and that many young fellows outside it would have
+been glad to get in on any terms whatever, he never gave a sign that he
+valued his opportunity; and when he finally pulled out it was with no
+regard to any possible successor.</p>
+
+<p>The younger men in the bank were a rather trim lot, and were expected to
+be. They did wonders, in the way of dressing, on their sixty or
+seventy-five dollars a month. Raymond's own dressing, for some little
+time past, had grown somewhat slack and careless. I did him the
+injustice of supposing that he felt himself to be himself, and <i>hors
+concours</i> so far as the general body of clerklings was concerned; but he
+had other reasons.</p>
+
+<p>He had given up buying books and periodicals; no new volumes to be seen
+in his room except works of travel (preferably guide-books) and grammars
+and dictionaries of foreign languages. For all such works of general
+uplift and inspiration as the intending tourist in Europe might expect
+to profit by, he depended on circulating libraries or the shelves of
+friends. I myself lent him a book of travels in the Dolomites, and
+scarcely know, now, whether I did<a class="pagenum" title="67" name="page_67" id="page_67"></a> well or ill. Raymond, in short, was
+silently, doggedly saving, with the intention of taking a trip&mdash;or of
+making a sojourn&mdash;abroad.</p>
+
+<p>The cleavage came in James Prince's front parlor, one Sunday afternoon,
+and I happened to be present. A very few words sufficed. Raymond's
+father had picked up a thick little book from the centre-table, the only
+book in the room, and was looking back and forth between this work&mdash;an
+Italian dictionary&mdash;and Raymond himself.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you expect to get out of this?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I expect to learn some Italian," Raymond replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't French be more useful?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know all the French I need."</p>
+
+<p>"Where do you expect to use your Italian?"</p>
+
+<p>"In Italy. I didn't go to college."</p>
+
+<p>Impossible to depict the quality of Raymond's tone in speaking these
+five words. There was no color, no emphasis, no seeming presentation of
+a case. It was the cool, level statement of a fact; nor did he try to
+make the fact too pertinent, too cogent. An hour-long<a class="pagenum" title="68" name="page_68" id="page_68"></a> oration would not
+have been more effective. He had calmly taken off a lid and had
+permitted a look within. His father saw&mdash;saw that whatever Raymond, by
+plus or by minus, might be, he was no longer a boy.</p>
+
+<p>"I know," said James Prince, slowly. He was looking past us both and was
+opening and shutting the covers of the book unconsciously.</p>
+
+<p>A day or two later, Raymond gave me the rest. His father had asked him
+how much money he had. Out of his sixty or seventy-five a month Raymond
+had set aside several hundreds; "and I said I could make the rest by
+corresponding for some newspaper," he continued. This was in the simple
+day when travel-letters from Europe were still printed and read in the
+newspapers, and even "remunerated" by editors. Incredible, perhaps, in
+this day; yet true for that.</p>
+
+<p>His father had asked him how long he intended to be away. Raymond was
+non-committal. He might travel for a year, or he might try "living" there
+for a while&mdash;a long while. A matter of funds and of luck, it seemed. His
+father, without pressing him<a class="pagenum" title="69" name="page_69" id="page_69"></a> closely, offered to double whatever sum he
+had saved up. He appeared neither pleased nor displeased by Raymond's
+course. He felt I suppose, that the bank would hardly suffer, and that
+Raymond (whom he did not understand) might get some profit. Fathers have
+their own opinions of sons, which opinions range, I dare say, all the
+way from charitableness to desperation. In the case of my own son, I am
+glad to say, a very slight degree of charitableness was all the tax laid
+upon me. There were some distressing months of angularity, both in
+physique and in manners, at seventeen; then a quick and miraculous
+escape into trimness and grace. And my grandson, now at nine, promises
+to be, I am glad to state, even more of a success and a pleasure. As for
+Raymond, he had developed unevenly: his growth had gone athwart.
+Possibly the "world," that vast, vague entity of which his father's
+knowledge was restricted almost to one narrow field, might aid in
+straightening the boy out.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, try it for a year," his father said, not unkindly, and almost
+wistfully.<a class="pagenum" title="70" name="page_70" id="page_70"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="VI_1368" id="VI_1368"></a>
+<h2>VI</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>When Johnny McComas heard of Raymond's resolve, he drew up his round
+face into a grimace. He thought the step queer, and he said so. But,
+"Oh, well, if a fellow can afford it!" he added. And he did not explain
+just what meaning he attached to the word "afford."</p>
+
+<p>But Johnny could see no valid reason for a fellow's giving the town the
+go-by at nineteen and at just that stage of the town's development.
+Johnny was so made that the community which housed him was necessarily
+the centre of the cosmos; he himself, howsoever placed, was necessarily
+at the centre of the circle&mdash;so why leave the central dot for some vague
+situation on the circumference? And take this particular town: what a
+present! what a future! what a wide extension over the limitless prairie
+with every passing month!&mdash;a prairie which merely needed to be cut up
+into small checkers and sold to hopeful newcomers; a prairie which
+produced profits as freely as it produced goldenrod and asters; a<a class="pagenum" title="71" name="page_71" id="page_71"></a>
+prairie upon which home-seekers might settle down under agents whose
+wide range, running from helpful co&ouml;peration to absolute flimflam, need
+leave no competent "operator" other than rich.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you going to get out of it?" asked Johnny earnestly.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond attempted no set reply. Johnny, he recognized, was out for
+positive results, for tangible returns; his idea was to get on in the
+world by definite and unmistakable stages. Raymond never welcomed the
+idea of "getting on"&mdash;not at least in the sense in which his own day and
+place used the expression. To do so was but to acknowledge some early
+inferiority. Raymond was not conscious of any inferiority to be
+overcome. Johnny might, of course, on this particular point, feel as he
+chose.</p>
+
+<p>About this time old Jehiel Prince began to come more frequently to his
+son's house. He was yellower and grayer, and he was getting testy and
+irascible. He sometimes brought his lawyer with him, and the pair made
+James Prince an active participant in their concerns.<a class="pagenum" title="72" name="page_72" id="page_72"></a> However, Jehiel
+was perhaps less unhappy here than in his own home. When there, he sat
+moodily alone, of evenings, in his basement office; and Raymond, who was
+sometimes sent over with documents or with messages, impatiently
+reported him to me as "glum."</p>
+
+<p>"Poor old fellow! he doesn't know how to live!" said Raymond in
+complacent pity. He himself, of course, had but to assemble all the
+bright-hued elements that awaited him a few months ahead to make his own
+life a poem, a song.</p>
+
+<p>"I can do that," he once said, in a moment when exaltation had briefly
+made him confidential.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond never saw his grandmother&mdash;at least he never cared to see her.
+Here, if nowhere else, he was willing to take a cue, and he took it from
+the head of the family. He thought that so many years of town life might
+have made her a little less rustic in the end: the York State of 1835 or
+of 1840 need not have remained York State so immitigably. And if there
+was a domestic blight<a class="pagenum" title="73" name="page_73" id="page_73"></a> on the house he was willing to believe that she
+was two thirds to blame: behind the old soul was a pack of poor
+relations. Particularly a brother-in-law&mdash;a bilious, cadaverous fellow,
+whom I saw once, and once was enough. He had been an itinerant preacher
+farther East, and he lived in a woeful little cottage along one of
+Jehiel's horse-car routes. His mournful-eyed wife was always asking
+help. He too had "gone into real-estate," and unsuccessfully. He was the
+dull reverse of that victorious obverse upon which Johnny McComas was
+beginning to shine.</p>
+
+<p>Another of her relatives, a niece, had married a small-town sharper. He
+had brought her to the larger town, and his sharpness had taken on a
+keener edge. He, too, had gone into real-estate&mdash;a lean, wiry little
+man, incredibly arid and energetic, and carrying a preposterously large
+mustache. There was trouble with him after Jehiel's death. It developed
+that one of the documents which old Beulah Prince had been cajoled or
+hectored into signing had deeded to him&mdash;temporarily and for a specific
+purpose&mdash;some forty<a class="pagenum" title="74" name="page_74" id="page_74"></a> acres of purple and yellow prairie flowers,
+delightful blossoms nodding and swaying in the wind, and that he had
+refused to deed more than half of them back: his services at that
+particular juncture were "worth something," he said. Well, life (as may
+have been remarked previously) would be quite tolerable without one's
+relatives. Meanwhile the summer flowers bloomed and nodded on, under the
+windy blue sky, all unaware of their disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>A month after Raymond's decision, flowers (of the sort favored in
+cemeteries) were trying to bloom over old Jehiel. Some stroke, some
+lesion, had put a period to the unhappy career of this grim old man.
+Raymond set to one side, for a few weeks, his new trunk and portmanteau;
+for a few weeks only&mdash;he had no notion of making, ultimately, any great
+change in his plans. It was obvious that James Prince was looking
+forward to a year or two of harassing procedure in the courts, for old
+Jehiel's estate was unlikely to smooth out with celerity; but Raymond
+was clearly of no use at home, even as a mere source of<a class="pagenum" title="75" name="page_75" id="page_75"></a> sympathy. A
+fortnight after his grandfather's funeral he was off.</p>
+
+<p>The singing-class would have given him good-bye in a special session;
+but his eyes were now on brighter matters and the vocalizing Gertrudes
+and Adeles were dim. He got out of it. Besides, the affair might come to
+involve something like ceremony; and he was always desirous of avoiding
+(save in the arts) the ceremonial side of life. When he came back from
+his first sojourn on the Continent he was a young man of mark, as things
+went in our particular town and time; or, rather, he might have been
+such, had he but chosen. The family fortunes were then merely at the
+stage of worry and still far from that of impending disaster. Raymond
+came back with money, position, and a certain aureole of personal
+distinction&mdash;just the sort of young man who would be asked to act as
+usher at a wedding. He <i>was</i> asked repeatedly; but he never acted, and
+his excuses and subterfuges for avoiding such a service almost became
+one of the comedies of the day. He had no relish for seeing himself
+walking ceremonially<a class="pagenum" title="76" name="page_76" id="page_76"></a> up a church aisle under the eyes of hundreds, and
+I knew better than to ask him to walk up any aisle for me. He never did
+the thing but once, and that was under the inescapable compulsion of his
+fianc&eacute;e&mdash;who, for her part, insisted on eyes and plenty of them. A man
+may never cease to be astonished at the workings of feminine preferences
+on such an occasion, but can hardly escape accommodating himself to
+them. Gertrudes are Gertrudes.</p>
+
+<p>But the wedding is years ahead, while the departure for Europe is
+imminent. Raymond had a tepid, awkward parting with his mother, whose
+headaches would not allow her to go to the train; and he shook hands
+rather coldly and constrainedly with his father, who would have
+welcomed, as I guess, some slight show of filial warmth, and he threw an
+embarrassedly facetious word to me about the weight of his portmanteau,
+and so was off. And it was years, rather than months, before he came
+back.<a class="pagenum" title="77" name="page_77" id="page_77"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="PART_III_1493" id="PART_III_1493"></a>
+<h2>PART III</h2>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="I_1499" id="I_1499"></a>
+<h2>I</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>While Raymond was taking his course abroad, Johnny McComas was shaping
+his course at home. A colorless, unbiased statement&mdash;as it was meant to
+be; one which, despite the slight difference between "taking" and
+"shaping," has no slant and displays no animus. Colorless, yes; too
+colorless, perhaps you will object. If so, I will reword the matter.
+While Raymond, then, was in Europe cultivating his gentler faculties,
+Johnny remained in America, strengthening certain specific powers. Or,
+again: while Raymond was preparing, or so he thought, for a desirably
+decorative place in the "world" (the world at large), Johnny was
+qualifying himself, as he felt sure, for an important and remunerative
+position in that particular section of the world to which he had decided
+to confine his endeavors. And if you ask me, after I have colored a
+colorless statement, to bias<a class="pagenum" title="78" name="page_78" id="page_78"></a> an unbiased one, I shall refuse. I am not
+taking sides. Each of them was following his own likings&mdash;not the worst
+of rules for a growing and avid organism.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond wrote, of course,&mdash;it was impossible that he should not; and I
+think I showed one or two of his early letters to Johnny. Johnny was not
+exactly interested; vistas were opened for which he had no eyes and
+which possessed no appositeness to his own aims.</p>
+
+<p>"Still over there, eh?" he asked, on my producing a second letter.
+"These are the years that count," he added. He was probably implying
+that the final score would make a better showing for the man who spent
+those years in his native and proper environment.</p>
+
+<p>He disregarded the general drift of the letters, but hit upon one or two
+novel expressions, and repeated them, half-quizzical, half-intrigue.</p>
+
+<p>"Still over there," I echoed. A developing nature, I felt, must reach
+out for whatever it needs; and, in simpler form, I said so.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm no misfit," he rejoined briefly.<a class="pagenum" title="79" name="page_79" id="page_79"></a> To "feel at home" at
+home&mdash;that, I presume, was the advantage he was asserting.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny, "at home," was not long in outgrowing the opportunities of
+Dellwood Park. Though he did not make, quite yet, the central district,
+a year or two later found him in an older and more important suburb&mdash;one
+that had passed the first acuteness of speculation and had pretty well
+settled down to a regulated life. It was not a suburb of the first rank,
+nor even perhaps of the second; but it suited his tastes and his present
+purposes. The new business combined banking and real-estate, and the
+banking department even maintained a small safety-deposit vault. There
+was also some insurance; and a little of mortgage-broking. Johnny was a
+highly prized element in this business and was pleased from the start
+with the outlook.</p>
+
+<p>"A fellow," he said, "can pick up more experience out there in a month
+than he could in one of these big downtown offices in a year."</p>
+
+<p>Nearly two years passed before I was to see him in his new environment.
+There came up<a class="pagenum" title="80" name="page_80" id="page_80"></a> a bit of business for a suburban client of mine which
+could as well be settled at Johnny's place as at another. It needed no
+more than a glance to perceive that Johnny was the dominant factor of
+the little institution. His was the biggest roller-top seen through a
+maze of gilt letters on a vast sheet of plate glass by commuters turning
+the corner morning and evening. His, too, chiefly, the deference of
+clerks and office-boy. He was ruddy and robust, and seemed likely to
+impose himself anywhere, when the time came. Thus far, a small Forum,
+perhaps; but he was the C&aelig;sar in it. He did not disdain to attend to my
+affair himself; he even showed an emphatic, if not ponderous,
+<i>bonhomie</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Just as I was getting up to leave, a man of forty-five or more, with the
+general aspect of a contractor's foreman, put in his head. It was
+Johnny's father.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess you know George Waite," Johnny said to him; "and I guess he
+knows you."</p>
+
+<p>We shook hands, under Johnny's direction, and said that he was right.
+His father's hand&mdash;rough and with a broken nail or<a class="pagenum" title="81" name="page_81" id="page_81"></a> two&mdash;was that of a
+superintendent who on occasion helped with a plank or a mortarboard. He
+had an open face and a pleasant manner; he was not at all the dominant
+personage I remembered meeting in that "yard," years ago. Johnny, it
+seemed, was putting up a row of small houses on the suburb's edge, and
+his father was supervising the job. Johnny was pretty direct in saying
+what he wanted done, or not done, in connection with this work; and if
+his father made a suggestion it was as likely as not to be overruled. He
+was only one of the senators in Johnny's little curia, and probably far
+from the most important of them.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny's father got away, after all, before I did. Johnny asked me to
+stay for a little, and there was not much for a young professional man
+to do after catching the 4.52 into town. We sat for a while talking of
+indifferent matters. Johnny, surrounded by his own prosperity, asked
+with a show of interest, and without condescension, about my progress in
+the law, and I was replying with the cautious vagueness of one whose
+practice is not<a class="pagenum" title="82" name="page_82" id="page_82"></a> yet all he hopes it will be. During this time I had
+noticed, through the maze of gilt lettering, a limousine standing just
+round the corner. Its curtains were drawn: "an odd circumstance," I had
+commented inwardly. All of a sudden the street-door of the bank burst
+open, and three masked men, brandishing revolvers, rushed in.</p>
+
+<p>"You cover the cashier!" cried one; "we'll take care of the vault!"</p>
+
+<p>Johnny McComas flung open a drawer, seized a revolver of his own, sprang
+to his feet&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Pardon me, dear reader. The simple fact is, I have suddenly been struck
+by my lack of drama. You see how awkwardly I provide it, when I try.
+What bank robbers, I ask you, would undertake such an adventure at
+half-past four in the afternoon? I cannot compete with the films. As a
+matter of fact, the vault stood locked, the tellers were gone, even the
+office-boy had stolen away, and Johnny and I were left alone together,
+exchanging rather feebly, and with increasing feebleness, some faint and
+unimportant boyhood reminiscences....<a class="pagenum" title="83" name="page_83" id="page_83"></a> I feel abysmally abashed; let us
+open a new section.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="II_1614" id="II_1614"></a>
+<h2>II</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>As I have said, Raymond wrote. He wrote, for example, with a voluminous
+duteousness, to his parents. His letters to them, so far as they came to
+my notice, were curious; probably he meant that they should be saved and
+should become a sort of journal of his travels. They were almost
+completely impersonal. There was plenty of straight description; but
+beyond some slight indications of his own movements, past or intended,
+there was no narration. He never mentioned people he met; he never
+described his adventures&mdash;if he had any. He seemed to be saying to
+Europe, as Rastignac said to Paris, "<i>&Agrave; nous deux, maintenant!</i>" He was
+at grips with the Old World, and that sufficed.</p>
+
+<p>His letters to me, however, were not devoid of personal reactions. These
+commonly took an &aelig;sthetic turn. An early letter from Rome had a good
+deal to say about the Baroque. He met it everywhere; it was an
+abomination;<a class="pagenum" title="84" name="page_84" id="page_84"></a> it tried his soul. Fontana and Maderna, the Gog and Magog
+of architecture, had flanked the portals of art and had let through a
+hideous throng of artificialities and corruptions.... The word "Baroque"
+was new to me, and I looked it up. I learned that it described, not a
+current movement, as I had supposed, but an influence which had
+exhausted itself nearly three hundred years ago. But it was still recent
+and real to Raymond. And I learned, further, that this style had modern
+champions who could say a good word for it. In any event, it might be
+accepted calmly as a valuable and characteristic link in the general
+historic chain.</p>
+
+<p>In another letter he was ecstatic over the Gothic brickwork of Cremona.
+It was so beautiful, he said in as many words, that it made his heart
+ache; not often did Raymond let himself go like that. Eager to follow
+his track&mdash;and to understand, if possible, his heart, however peculiar
+and baffling&mdash;I looked up, in turn, North Italian brickwork. This was
+twice three hundred years old. But it had stirred other modern hearts
+than Raymond's;<a class="pagenum" title="85" name="page_85" id="page_85"></a> for an English &aelig;sthete had tried (and almost succeeded)
+to impose it on his country as a living mode. "Very well," I said;
+"Italian brickwork may reasonably be accepted as a modern interest."</p>
+
+<p>Raymond, before descending to Italy, had spent some months in Paris.
+Circumstances had enabled him to frequent a few studios, and his first
+letter to me from that city had been rather technical and "viewy."
+Incidentally, he had seen something of the students, and had found
+little to approve, either in their manners or their morals. He left
+Paris without reporting any moral infractions of his own and settled
+down for some stay in Florence. He was studying the language further, he
+reported: a language, he said, which was easy to begin, but hard to
+continue&mdash;the longer you studied the less you really knew. However, he
+knew enough for daily practical purposes. His <i>pension</i> was pleasant;
+small, and the few visitors were mostly English.</p>
+
+<p>But there were one or two Americans in the house, and they came home a
+few months<a class="pagenum" title="86" name="page_86" id="page_86"></a> later with their account of Raymond and his ways. It was
+needed; for the three or four letters that he had printed in one of our
+newspapers contained little beyond descriptions of set sights&mdash;to think
+we should have continued to welcome that sort of thing so long! Well,
+these people reported him as conscientiously busy, for his hour each
+day, with grammar and dictionary. He was also getting his hand in
+painting; and he had "taken on" musical composition, even to
+instrumentation. "Too many irons!" commented my lively young informant.
+"And I think I should get my painting in Paris and my music in Germany."
+She also said that Raymond had next to no social life&mdash;he showed hardly
+the slightest desire to make acquaintances.</p>
+
+<p>"An old Frenchman came to the place for a few days," she continued; "and
+as he was leaving he said your friend was living in an ivory tower&mdash;the
+windows few, the door narrow, and the key thrown away. 'Ivory tower'&mdash;do
+you understand what that means?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," I said. But of course I understand now.<a class="pagenum" title="87" name="page_87" id="page_87"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="III_1688" id="III_1688"></a>
+<h2>III</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>As a consequence of my call at Johnny McComas's office (or as a probable
+consequence), I received, some six months later, an invitation to his
+wedding. You will expect to hear that I was present, and perhaps acted
+as usher, or even as best man. Nothing of the sort was the case,
+however; I was absent at the time in the East. Nor are you to imagine me
+as continually following, at close range, the vicissitudes, major and
+minor, which made up his life, or made up Raymond's. An exact, perpetual
+attendance of fifty years is completely out of the question. Don't
+expect it.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny married, I was told, a young woman living in his own suburb, the
+daughter of a manufacturer of some means. I met him about two months
+after his great step. He was still full of the new life, and full of the
+new wife.</p>
+
+<p>"She's fine!" he declared. "Not too fine, but fine enough for me."</p>
+
+<p>He cocked his hat to one side.<a class="pagenum" title="88" name="page_88" id="page_88"></a></p>
+
+<p>"Do you know, I talk to her just as I would to a man."</p>
+
+<p>"Johnny!" I began, almost gasping.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what's wrong? Ever said anything much out of the way to you? Ever
+heard me say anything to any other fellow?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, no...." I was obliged to acknowledge.</p>
+
+<p>"Then why the row? It's all easy as an old shoe. <i>She</i> likes it."</p>
+
+<p>"I know. But&mdash;talking with a woman ... It isn't quite like...."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't make any mistake. Just have the big things right, and they'll
+overlook lots of the little ones."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm," I said doubtfully. "I supposed it was just the other way. Lay a
+lot of stress on certain little things, and larger shortcomings won't
+bother them. Bring her a bunch of flowers to-day, and she'll help you
+deed away the house and lot to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Fudge!" said Johnny. "I mean the really big things. There's only two.
+Ground to stand on and air to breathe."</p>
+
+<p>"That is to say...?"<a class="pagenum" title="89" name="page_89" id="page_89"></a></p>
+
+<p>"A platform under her feet and an atmosphere about her. Well, she's got
+me to stand on and to surround her. She understands it. She likes it.
+Nothing else matters much."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" said I.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm her bedrock, and I'm her&mdash;How do they say it? I'm her&mdash;envelopment,
+as those painting fellows put it."</p>
+
+<p>"See here, Johnny," I protested; "Don't get anachronistic. We are only
+in 1884. That expression won't reach America for ten or fifteen years.
+Have some regard for dates."</p>
+
+<p>"It won't? Wasn't it in your friend's letter?"</p>
+
+<p>"What friend?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Prince; when he was in Paris. Didn't you read it to me?"</p>
+
+<p>I remembered.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know," he went on, "I've been straight as a string&mdash;ever since.
+And I'm going to keep so."</p>
+
+<p>"I should hope so, indeed."</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever I may have been before. But I think it's better for a young
+fellow to dash<a class="pagenum" title="90" name="page_90" id="page_90"></a> in and find out than to keep standing on the edge and
+just wonder."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know, Johnny," I returned soberly. "I'm going to be
+married myself, next month. And I expect to go to my bride just as
+pure&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No preaching," said Johnny. "The slate's wiped clean. Adele's all right
+for me, and I'm all right to her."</p>
+
+<p>He adjusted his hat, making the two sides of the brim level.</p>
+
+<p>"We're going to move shortly," he stated. "The business can go on where
+it is, for a while, but we're going to live somewhere else."</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps in the city itself, it appeared; perhaps in some suburb toward
+the north. But no longer in one to the west. Johnny was developing some
+such scent for social values and some such feeling for impending
+topographical changes as had begun to stir the great houses that were
+grouped about the Princes.</p>
+
+<p>"So you're the next one?" he said presently. "It's the only life. Good
+luck to you. And who's going to see you through? Prince?"<a class="pagenum" title="91" name="page_91" id="page_91"></a></p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;'my friend.' I'm glad you remember him."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes; I can remember him when I try. But I don't try very hard or
+very often. Back in this country?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is."</p>
+
+<p>"What's he doing?" Johnny fixed his hard blue eyes firmly on me.</p>
+
+<p>I was sorry to have no very definite answer. "He has been in the East
+lately. He'll be back here in time for me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Johnny darkly; and that was all.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="IV_1804" id="IV_1804"></a>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Raymond's "tower" was not static, but peripatetic. Early in his second
+summer abroad it was standing among the Dutch windmills for a brief
+season; and when he learned that I was to have a short vacation in
+England&mdash;the only quarter of the Old World I ever cared for&mdash;he left it
+altogether for a fortnight and came across from Flushing to see me.</p>
+
+<p>Two points immediately made themselves<a class="pagenum" title="92" name="page_92" id="page_92"></a> clear. Firstly, he was viewing
+the world through literature&mdash;through works of fiction in some cases,
+through guide-books in more. Everything was a spectacle, with himself
+quite outside as an onlooker; and nothing was a spectacle until it had
+been ranged and appraised in print. Secondly, if he was outside of
+things, America was still farther outside; it existed as a remote
+province not yet drawn into the activities and interests of the "world."
+He seemed willing, even anxious, to make himself secondary, subordinate.
+However he may have been on the Continent, here in England his desire to
+conform made him appear subservient and almost abject. My own unabashed
+and unconscious Americanism&mdash;the possible consequence of
+inexperience&mdash;sometimes embarrassed him, and he occasionally undertook
+to edit my dealings with members of the older half of our race, even
+with waiters and cabmen. As for the more boastful, aggressive,
+self-assertive sort of Americanism, <i>that</i> would make him tremble with
+anger and blush for shame.</p>
+
+<p>I will say this in his behalf, however: he<a class="pagenum" title="93" name="page_93" id="page_93"></a> did not like England and was
+not at home there.</p>
+
+<p>"The little differences," he observed, one day, "made more trouble than
+the big ones. A minor seventh is all right, while a minor second is
+distressing. I am happier among the Latins."</p>
+
+<p>Yet I am sure that even among his Latins he took the purely objective
+view and valued their objects of interest according as they were starred
+and double-starred, or left unmarked in the comparative neglect of small
+print.</p>
+
+<p>We saw together Canterbury and Cambridge and Brighton and a few other
+approved places. Through all these he walked with a meticulous
+circumspection, wondering what people thought, asking inwardly if he
+were squaring with their ideas of what conduct should be. Only once did
+I find him fully competent and sufficiently assertive. The incident
+occurred on a late afternoon, in a small side street just off the
+Strand, while I was casting about for one of those letter-pillars.
+Raymond was approached,<a class="pagenum" title="94" name="page_94" id="page_94"></a> as was proper to the locality and the time of
+day, by a young woman of thirty who had a hard, determined face and who
+was clothed on with a rustling black dress that jingled with jet. I was
+near enough to hear.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-afternoon," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-afternoon."</p>
+
+<p>"Where," with marked expressiveness, "are you going?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to stand right here."</p>
+
+<p>"Give me a drink."</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't think of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Stand," she said, with sudden viciousness, "stand and rot!"</p>
+
+<p>Raymond, after an instant's surprise, made a response in his unstudied
+vernacular. "Yes, <i>I'll</i> stand; but you skip. Shoo!"</p>
+
+<p>She was preparing some retort, but he waved both his hands, wide out, as
+if starting a ruffled, vindictive hen across a highway. At the same time
+he caught sight of a constable on the corner, and let her see that he
+saw&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Constable!"&mdash;why, I am as bad as Raymond himself: I mean, of course,
+policeman.<a class="pagenum" title="95" name="page_95" id="page_95"></a></p>
+
+<p>But the London police are sometimes chary in the exercise of their
+functions. What really started the woman on her way was his next brief
+remark, accompanied by the hands, as before, though with a more decided
+shade of propulsion.</p>
+
+<p>"Scoot!" She went, without words.</p>
+
+<p>These were the only American observations I heard from Raymond during
+that fortnight.</p>
+
+<p>I wish he had been as successful on the night of our arrival in London
+when we encountered, in the court behind the big gilded grille of the
+Grand Metropole, the porter of that grandiose establishment. We had come
+together from Harwich and did not reach this hotel until half an hour
+before midnight. We had had our things put on the pavement and had
+dismissed the cab, and the porter, with an airy, tentative insolence,
+now reported the place full.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> don't know who ordered your luggage down, sir; <i>I</i> didn't," he said
+with a smile that was an experiment in disrespect.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond looked as if he were for immediately<a class="pagenum" title="96" name="page_96" id="page_96"></a> adjusting himself to
+this&mdash;though I could hardly imagine his ever having done the like in
+Paris or in Florence. He was quite willing to confess himself in the
+wrong: yes, he ought to have remembered that the "season" was beginning;
+he ought to have known that this particular season, though young, had
+set in with uncommon vigor; he ought to have known that all the hotels,
+even the largest, were likely to be crowded and have sent on a wire. The
+porter, emboldened by the departure of the cab, and by my companion's
+contrite silence, began to embroider the theme.</p>
+
+<p>Now a single week in England had taught me that no two men in that
+country&mdash;the home of political but not of social democracy&mdash;are likely
+to talk long on even terms. One man must almost necessarily take the
+upper hand and leave to the other the lower, and the relation must be
+reached early. I resolved on the upper&mdash;cab or no cab. I glared&mdash;as well
+and as coldly as I could. The fellow was only a year or so older than I.</p>
+
+<p>"You are too chatty," I said. "Fewer<a class="pagenum" title="97" name="page_97" id="page_97"></a> words and more action. If you are
+full, call somebody to take us and our baggage to some hotel near by
+that is not full."</p>
+
+<p>The fellow sobered down and gave us his first look resembling respect.</p>
+
+<p>"Very good, sir. I will, sir. Thank you, sir,"&mdash;though he had nothing to
+thank me for, and though he well knew there was to be nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond looked at me as one looks at a friend who surprises by the
+sudden disclosure of some unexpected talent or power.</p>
+
+<p>"But you said 'baggage,'" he commented.</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed I did," said I.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="V_1938" id="V_1938"></a>
+<h2>V</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Our new hotel, we discovered next morning, was duplicated in name by
+another, four doors down the street. During the day we heard the reason
+for this. A domestic difficulty had overtaken husband and wife and the
+two had separated, each keeping an interest in the serviceable name and
+a frontage on the familiar street. We were in the husband's hotel, under
+the very discreet ministrations<a class="pagenum" title="98" name="page_98" id="page_98"></a> of the young woman who had caused the
+break. "Do you quite like this?" Raymond had asked me. But he became
+reassured on seeing in the guest-book the names of two or three
+well-known and sufficiently respected compatriots. By the next day he
+was able to cast on Miss Brough, as she flitted (still discreetly)
+through her functions, the eye of a qualified idealization. I am sure he
+would never have viewed indulgently any such situation at home. But the
+poor, patient, cautious girl helped him toward realizing the
+sophistications and corruptions of European society, and so he welcomed
+her. But I believe he avoided speaking to her. She may have been hurt,
+or she may have been amused; or neither. Yet, after all, this
+<i>contretemps</i> was for him, I felt, but a prosaic substitute for
+something richer. A similar situation in Naples, say, taken at close
+range, might have quickened his interest considerably.</p>
+
+<p>Next day there was something different for him to report. He had gone
+into a courtyard off Holborn, drawn by the sound of a<a class="pagenum" title="99" name="page_99" id="page_99"></a> hurdy-gurdy. Four
+or five little girls were dancing, and some older women stood looking
+on. For a few moments he looked on too, probably with an effect of aloof
+and amused patronage. But patronage was not for that court.</p>
+
+<p>Presently one of the younger women, who wore a hat full of messy plumes
+and carried a small fish in each hand by the tail, stepped up and
+invited him to trip a measure with her. "Trip a measure"&mdash;it has a fine
+Elizabethan or Jacobean sound, whether she used the precise expression
+or not. But Raymond demurred; at first politely; later, perhaps not so
+politely. But he was whisked into the dance and made to take several
+turns. He was so embarrassed that he called it all an "adventure."
+Possibly it was meant for a lesson in manners.</p>
+
+<p>Thus Raymond in England. As he said, he liked the Continent better. I
+hope he showed to better advantage there, and I should have liked to see
+him there&mdash;to be with him there. For he rather put a brake on any
+measure of exuberance and momentum<a class="pagenum" title="100" name="page_100" id="page_100"></a> which I might have brought to
+England with me, and I could only trust that his strait-jacket was
+partly unlaced among the French and Italians. I think that likely, for
+with them he was, of course, an acknowledged and unmistakable foreigner.
+But my fortnight with him was cramped and uncomfortable; and when we
+parted at the American Exchange&mdash;I for Liverpool and he for Calais&mdash;I
+confess I had a slight feeling of relief. I felt, too, that my conduct,
+however native and unstudied, had pleased the Island quite as well as
+his.</p>
+
+<p>At the Exchange itself he never read American newspapers&mdash;least of all,
+one from his own town. I believe, too, he avoided them on the Continent.
+Living a very special life, he meant to keep himself integral,
+uncontaminate. And behind us both was the other world, his own, all
+vital and astir.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, I am aware that my prose is pedestrian, and that Europe&mdash;as it once
+was, to us&mdash;deserves a brighter and higher note. I will attempt, just
+here, a purple patch.</p>
+
+<p>Europe, then,&mdash;the beacon, hope, and<a class="pagenum" title="101" name="page_101" id="page_101"></a> cynosure of our fresh, ingenuous
+youth&mdash;the glamorous realm afar which drew to itself from across the sea
+our eager artist-bands, pilgrims to the Old, the Stately, and the Fair;
+Europe, which reared above our dull horizon the towers of Oxford and of
+Notre Dame, sent up into our pale, empty sky the shimmering mirage of
+Venice, and cast across our workaday way the grave and noble shadow of
+Rome; Europe, which gave out through the varying voices of Correggio,
+Canova, Hugo, and Wagner the cry, so lofty and so piercing-sweet, of
+Art; Europe, which with titles and insignia and social grandeurs, once
+dazzled and bemused our inexperienced senses ... and so on.</p>
+
+<p>Easy!</p>
+
+<p>But worth while?</p>
+
+<p>I shall not attempt to decide.</p>
+
+<p>To-day Europe seems not all we once found it; and we, on the other hand,
+have come to be more than some of us at least once figured ourselves. We
+are beginning to have glamours and importances of our own.<a class="pagenum" title="102" name="page_102" id="page_102"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="VI_2025" id="VI_2025"></a>
+<h2>VI</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Raymond lingered on for a year or more in Italy, and came home, as I
+have implied, in time for my wedding. He found his native city more
+uncouth and unkempt than ever. Such it was, absolutely; and such it was,
+relatively, after his years under a more careful and self-respecting
+r&eacute;gime. The population was still advancing by leaps and bounds, and
+hopeful spirits had formed a One-Million Club. A few others, even more
+ardent, said that the population was already a million, or close upon
+it, and busied themselves to start a Two-Million Club. They had their
+eyes wide open to the advantage of numbers, and tightly closed to the
+palpable fact that the community was unable properly to house and
+administer the numbers it already had. The city seemed to cry: "I need a
+friendly monitor&mdash;one who will point me out the decencies and compel me
+to adopt them." The demagogue who had ruled and misruled before had been
+re&euml;lected once or twice, and the newspapers were still indulging their
+familiar<a class="pagenum" title="103" name="page_103" id="page_103"></a> strain of irresponsible and ineffective criticism. The dark
+world behind him had become more populous and bold, and the forces for
+good still seemed unable to organize and co&ouml;perate toward making
+betterment an actuality. But new people were always flocking in&mdash;people
+from the farms, villages and country-towns of the Middle region&mdash;and
+bringing with them the uncontaminated rustic ideals of rightness and
+decorum: a clean stream pouring into a turbid pool, and the time was to
+come when it would make itself felt. Meanwhile, the city remained&mdash;to
+Raymond&mdash;a gross, sharp village, one full of folk who, whether from the
+Middle West or from Middle Europe, had never come within ten leagues of
+gentility, and who, one and all, were absorbedly and unabashedly bent on
+the object which had suddenly assembled them at this one favored
+spot&mdash;the pushing of their individual fortunes. A hauptstadt-to-be,
+perhaps; but, so far, an immensely inchoate and repellent miscellany.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond's father gave him a sober welcome. His mother attempted a brief,
+spasmodic<a class="pagenum" title="104" name="page_104" id="page_104"></a> display of affection; but it was too much, and only a maid
+and her pillows saw her for the next few days. His father seemed older,
+much older; tired, careworn, worried. The trouble of settling old
+Jehiel's estate had been all that could have been expected, and more.
+There were claims, complications, lawsuits, what not; and through all
+this maze James Prince had to put up with the inherited help of the dry,
+dismal old fellow whom I had seen in earlier days at the house. I had
+come, now, to a better professional knowledge of him. He was a man of
+probity, and of some ability, but a deliberate; impossible to hurry, and
+not easy, as it seemed, even to interest. Under him matters dragged
+dully through the courts, and others' nerves were worn to shreds. I
+remember how surprised I was one day on hearing that he had picked up
+enough resolution to die.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond did not much concern himself about his father's burdens. He
+assumed, I suppose, that such taxes on a man's brain and general
+vitality were proper enough to middle age and to the business life of a
+large<a class="pagenum" title="105" name="page_105" id="page_105"></a> city. However, he was living&mdash;just as he had principally lived
+abroad&mdash;on his father's bounty. His contributions to the press&mdash;whether
+a daily, or, of late, a monthly&mdash;brought in no significant sums; and a
+bequest of some size from his grandfather was slow in finding its way
+into his hands.</p>
+
+<p>As I have said, Raymond might have taken an advantageous position in
+home society. He made no effort, and I sometimes caught myself wondering
+if his attitude might be that there was "nobody here." He might have
+joined his father's club; but the older men principally played billiards
+and talked their business affairs between. However, he did not care for
+billiards, nor had their affairs any affinity with his. A younger
+set&mdash;noisy and assertive out of proportion to its numbers&mdash;gave him no
+consolation, still less anything like edification. They were <i>au
+premier plan</i>; they possessed no background; they were without
+atmosphere&mdash;without envelopment, as Johnny McComas might have amended it
+(though no such lack would have been noted or resented by Johnny
+himself). <i>Bref</i>, he<a class="pagenum" title="106" name="page_106" id="page_106"></a> knew what they all were without going to see. And
+as for "society," it rustled flimsily, like tissue-paper; bright, in a
+way, but still thin and crackling.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder how he found such society as attended my wedding. I shall not
+describe it; I did not describe Johnny's&mdash;probably the more important
+event of the two for the purposes of this calm narrative. Yet, if you
+will permit me, I shall touch on two points.</p>
+
+<p>I wish, first, to say that, in my ears and to my eyes, the name "Elsie"
+is just as dear and charming as it ever was. Perhaps, at one period of
+my courtship, I wondered if the name would wear. No name more delightful
+and suitable for a gay, arch, sweet young girl of twenty; but how, I
+asked myself, will the name sit on a woman of forty, or on one of sixty?
+Well, I will confess that, at forty, a certain strain of incongruity
+appeared; but it marvelously vanished during the following score of
+years, and the name now seems utterly right for the dainty figure and
+gentle face of my lifelong companion. And though<a class="pagenum" title="107" name="page_107" id="page_107"></a> our eldest daughter is
+unmarried and thirty-five, we have never regretted passing on this
+beautiful name to her.</p>
+
+<p>My second point must deal with Raymond's attitude toward me on my
+wedding-day and on the days preceding it. He was stiff, constrained,
+dissatisfied&mdash;merely courteous toward my Elsie, and not at all cordial
+to me. I wondered whether he blamed me for thus bringing him back home;
+but the real reason, as I came to understand later, was quite different.
+He regarded the marriage of a friend as a personal deprivation, and the
+bride as the chief figure in the conspiracy. After my defection, or
+misappropriation, he solaced himself by trying to make one or two other
+friendships. When these friends married in turn, like process produced
+like results. These men, however, he threw overboard completely; in my
+case, he showed, after a while, some relenting, and ultimately even
+forgiveness. By the time he came to marry on his own account, the last
+of his very few bachelor friends had "gone off"; so there was no chance
+of inflicting on anybody that<a class="pagenum" title="108" name="page_108" id="page_108"></a> displeasure which others had several
+times inflicted on him.</p>
+
+<p>He sent Elsie a suitable present, and stood beside me through the
+ceremony as graciously as he was able.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you both great joy," he said firmly, at the end; and it was six
+weeks before we saw him in our little home.<a class="pagenum" title="109" name="page_109" id="page_109"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="PART_IV_2139" id="PART_IV_2139"></a>
+<h2>PART IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="I_2145" id="I_2145"></a>
+<h2>I</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Johnny McComas was still carrying on his business life and his home life
+in the suburb where he had married, when I came, finally, to make my
+first call on the domestic group of which he was the nub. Still in the
+future was the day when he was to move into town, and to have also a
+summer home on the North Shore, and to make some of his father-in-law's
+spare funds yield profitable results, and to arouse among wistful clerks
+and unsuccessful "operators" an admiring wonder as the youngest
+bank-president in the "Loop."</p>
+
+<p>I looked in on him one evening in late November. I found a house too
+emphatically furnished and a wife too concerned about making an
+impression. I did not consider myself a young man of prime consequence
+and did not relish the expenditure of so much effort: after all,
+Johnny's standing, Johnny's<a class="pagenum" title="110" name="page_110" id="page_110"></a> wife, Johnny's domestic <i>entourage</i> were
+not before a judgment-bar. It was plain to see that for Mrs. John W.
+McComas complete social comfort had not yet been reached, and I wondered
+if the next move might not show it as farther away than ever.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny himself was bluff and direct, and took things as a matter of
+course. Much had been done, but more remained to be done; meanwhile all
+was well and good. After a little, his wife was content to leave us
+alone together, and we drifted to Johnny's "den"&mdash;a word new at that
+time, and descriptive of the only feature of his home on which he laid
+the slightest self-conscious emphasis.</p>
+
+<p>I had heard that there were twins&mdash;boys; and soon, as the evening was
+still young, I heard the twins themselves. They had reached the age of
+ten months, and consequently had developed wants, but no articulate
+means for making those wants known. Therefore they howled, and they
+began howling in unison now. Perhaps it was for them that a foresighted
+mother had left us alone together.<a class="pagenum" title="111" name="page_111" id="page_111"></a></p>
+
+<p>"Great little hollerers!" said Johnny placidly, pulling at his pipe.</p>
+
+<p>I was still a bachelor. "Might shut the door?" I proposed.</p>
+
+<p>"If you like," said Johnny, without enthusiasm. "They wake me every
+morning at five," he added.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, I was still a bachelor&mdash;and probably a tactless, even a brutal,
+one.</p>
+
+<p>"Might move them to another bedroom, farther away?" I suggested. The
+house seemed big enough for such an arrangement.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't want to," declared Johnny. He began pulling at his pipe again,
+and there was a little silence during which I might meditate on the curt
+nobility of his remark.</p>
+
+<p>The fact was, of course, that Johnny loved life; he embraced it with
+gusto, with both arms outspread. No sidestepping its advances; no
+dodging its sharp angles; no feeble mitigating of a situation for which
+he was himself responsible; no paltry deadening of domestic uproar
+merely because he himself happened to be within the domestic
+environment. "If Adele stands it, I will too&mdash;they're<a class="pagenum" title="112" name="page_112" id="page_112"></a> mine as well as
+hers,"&mdash;such I conceive to have been his attitude. Johnny had no nerves,
+and only a minimum of sensibility. The sound-waves broke on his
+sensorium as ripples break on a granite coast. Perhaps they pleased him;
+perhaps they even soothed him. Why, bless you! these children were
+<i>his</i>! They were facts as great and as unescapable as the ebb and flow
+of the tides, as dawn and twilight, as the morning and evening stars.
+And the evening stars were singing together. Great may have been the
+jubilation for Johnny's ears, boundless the content in Johnny's heart.</p>
+
+<p>I really think that Johnny felt through the din some of the exhilaration
+that often came to him with a good brisk scrap in his office&mdash;or in the
+other man's office. In fact, home and business were Johnny's two sources
+of interest and pleasure&mdash;the warp and woof of his life&mdash;and he was
+determined on getting the utmost out of each. His interest in his home
+circle may somewhat have declined&mdash;or at least have moderated&mdash;with
+advancing years, but it was incandescent now. His interest in<a class="pagenum" title="113" name="page_113" id="page_113"></a> the
+outside world&mdash;that oyster-bin awaiting his knife&mdash;never slackened, not
+even when the futility of piling up the empty shells became
+daylight-clear, and when higher things strove perseveringly, even
+unmistakably, to beckon him on. Never, in fact, throughout his life did
+he exhibit more than two essential concerns: one for his family and
+clan; and one for the great outside mass of mediocre individuals through
+whose ineptitudes he justly expected to profit.</p>
+
+<p>Well, the door of the den remained open, and our talk went on to the
+rising and falling of infant voices. At last, thinking that my good-bye
+must be to Johnny only, I rose to go. You might reasonably ask for a
+clearer impression of his home and a more definite account of his wife.
+But what can I say when the primary address was so disconcertingly to
+the ear? Of his wife&mdash;who came down, during a lull, at the last
+moment&mdash;I can only say that she seemed too <i>empress&eacute;e</i> at the beginning
+and too casual at the end. Perhaps she had decided that, after all, I
+was no more than I myself claimed to be. Perhaps the<a class="pagenum" title="114" name="page_114" id="page_114"></a> infant hurricane
+was still ruffling the surface of her mind, or even disturbing its
+depths.</p>
+
+<p>"I won't ask you to call again," she said, as we shook hands for a
+good-night: "we shall be moving in the spring." She spoke with a
+satisfied air of self-recognized <i>finesse</i>, and as in the confident hope
+of completing very promptly some well-planned little programme; but&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Visit us there," said Johnny, with a quick cordiality which prevented
+his wife from redeeming herself.</p>
+
+<p>"There" had been the chief topic in the den. Many neighborhoods had been
+brought forward, with their attendant advantages and disadvantages.
+Johnny told me what he thought, and let me say what I thought. When I
+listened, it was as a man who might soon have a similar problem to
+consider. When I spoke it was to utter banalities sedately; any
+neighborhood might do, I said, that had good air; yes, and good
+schools&mdash;looking toward the future. And any house, I felt, would serve,
+if it had a nursery that was sealed, sound proof, remote....<a class="pagenum" title="115" name="page_115" id="page_115"></a></p>
+
+<p>"Well, best luck in your search for your roof-tree," I said earnestly to
+them both.</p>
+
+<p>"'Roof-tree'!" echoed Johnny. And, in fact, my observation did seem
+rather artificial and insincere.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="II_2265" id="II_2265"></a>
+<h2>II</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>By the time Raymond reached home, Johnny McComas had turned his informal
+suburban enterprise into a "state" bank, with his father-in-law as
+president and himself as cashier. The father-in-law lent his name and
+furnished most of the capital; Johnny himself provided the driving
+power. And by the time Raymond had become, through his father's death,
+the head of the family and the controller of the family funds, Johnny
+had turned his state bank into a national bank, with its offices in the
+city and with himself as president; and he had bought&mdash;at a bargain&mdash;a
+satisfactory house on the edge of the neighborhood where we first met
+him. The street was marked for business advance more promptly and more
+unmistakably than the precise quarter<a class="pagenum" title="116" name="page_116" id="page_116"></a> of the Princes. It would do as a
+home for a few years. The transaction appealed both to McComas's thrift
+and his pride. The coming of his new little bank, with its modest
+capital, made no particular stir in the "street"; and the great group of
+houses to the eastward were so apprehensive of open outrage, in one form
+or another, that his approach, in a guise still social, provoked but
+scant concern.</p>
+
+<p>James Prince died when Raymond was about thirty. A careful, plodding man
+who had never brought any direct difficulties upon himself, but who had
+been worried&mdash;and worried out&mdash;through troubles left him by others. On
+the whole, he had found life an unrewarding thing; and he passed along,
+at fifty-five, with no great regrets. The tangle of family affairs had
+finally been straightened out in considerable measure, though Raymond
+found enough detail still left to make him realize what a five years his
+father had passed through; and when, the year following, his mother
+died, with the settlement of her estate almost overlapping the
+settlement<a class="pagenum" title="117" name="page_117" id="page_117"></a> of his father's, he acquired a new sense of the grinding,
+taxing possibilities of business. I speak from his own viewpoint; he was
+susceptible&mdash;unduly, abnormally so&mdash;to the grind and the tax. After a
+few months of clammy old Brand and his methods, he suddenly cut loose
+from him (without waiting for him to die, as he did a little later); and
+he told me that I was the man to wind up these tedious affairs. They
+were not nearly so difficult and complicated as they seemed to him&mdash;they
+were now largely routine matters, in fact; and I hope I carried things
+along at a tempo which satisfied him. This is not to deny that Raymond
+seemed to have days when he found even me dilatory and exasperating; but
+old Brand would probably have driven him mad.</p>
+
+<p>Well, the prospects of his estate were not too brilliant. The lawsuits
+had been expensive and sometimes unsuccessful; the bank had passed a
+dividend, and the old houses, which had meant a lot of money in their
+day, meant less now and even loss in a near future. The time was fast
+coming when this<a class="pagenum" title="118" name="page_118" id="page_118"></a> circumscribed and unprotected neighborhood was to
+admit other&mdash;and prejudicial&mdash;interests: boarding-houses, of course; and
+refined homes for inebriates; and correspondence-schools for engineers;
+and one of the Prince houses became eventually the seat of a
+publishing-firm which needed a little distinction more than it needed a
+wide spread of glass close to the sidewalk.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the state of Raymond's fortunes, it was easy to see that they
+were not likely to improve in his hands. He detested business, both <i>en
+gros</i> and <i>en d&eacute;tail</i>. Despite his ancestry, he seemed to have been born
+with no faculty for money-making, and he never tried to make up his
+deficiency. It was all of a piece with the stone-throwing of his boyhood
+days&mdash;he never attempted to improve himself: it was enough to follow the
+gifts with which he had been natively endowed. Precept, example,
+opportunity&mdash;all these went for naught. To the end of his days he viewed
+the American "business man" as a portentous and inexplicable
+phenomenon&mdash;one to be regarded with distaste<a class="pagenum" title="119" name="page_119" id="page_119"></a> and wonder. He persisted
+in thinking of the type as a juvenile one&mdash;an energetic and clever boy,
+who was immensely active and immensely productive of results (in an
+immensely limited field), but who was incapable of anything like an
+<i>aper&ccedil;u</i> or a <i>Weltanschauung</i> (oh, he had plenty of words for it!), and
+who was essentially booked to lose much more than he gained. He disliked
+"offices" and abominated "hours." I think that even my own modest
+professional applications sometimes became a puzzle to him....</p>
+
+<p>And here I stand&mdash;convicted of having perpetrated another section
+without one short paragraph and without a single line of conversation.
+Let me hasten to bring Raymond to my suite and my desk-side, and make
+him speak.</p>
+
+<p>He came down one morning, as administrator of his mother's estate, to
+consider the appraisal of the personal property&mdash;many familiar items,
+and some discouraging ones.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you <i>have</i> to do this?" he asked me, with the paper in his hand. "Do
+you <i>like</i> to do it?"<a class="pagenum" title="120" name="page_120" id="page_120"></a></p>
+
+<p>"The world's work," I rejoined temperately. "It's got to be done."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm!" he returned. "The world's a varied place. And its work is varied
+too. This blessed town must be taught that."</p>
+
+<p>Was he girding himself to be one of its teachers?</p>
+
+<p>From that time on I resolved to take him patiently and good-humoredly: a
+friend must bear a friend's infirmities.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="III_2361" id="III_2361"></a>
+<h2>III</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>I did not know, with precision, what phases of the world's work were
+engaging Raymond's attention. I suppose he was adventuring, rather
+vaguely, among the "liberal arts," though he probably saw, by this time,
+that a full professional exercise of any of them was beyond his reach.
+He was heard of as writing short essays and reviews for one or two
+genteel publications, as making water-color tours through the none too
+alluring suburbs, as composing minor pieces for a little musical society
+which he had joined and which he wished<a class="pagenum" title="121" name="page_121" id="page_121"></a> to advance, and so on.
+Acquaintances reported him at architectural exhibits and at
+book-auctions&mdash;occasions neither numerous nor important. He lived on
+alone in his father's house&mdash;expensively; too expensively, of course,
+for it was an exacting place to keep up.</p>
+
+<p>He was coming to be known in a small circle&mdash;but an influential one&mdash;as
+a young man of wealth, culture, and good-will. But his wealth was less
+than supposed, his culture was self-centred, and his good-will was
+neither broad nor zealous.</p>
+
+<p>However, the new day was coming when he could be turned to account&mdash;or
+when, at least, people made the attempt.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, does not mean philanthropy. That was barely dawning as a
+social necessity. The few who were supporting charitable institutions
+and were working in the recently evolved slums were neither conspicuous
+nor fashionable. Nor does it mean political betterment. No efforts had
+yet been successful in substituting for the city's executive incubus a
+man of worthier type, nor<a class="pagenum" title="122" name="page_122" id="page_122"></a> was there yet any effective organization
+founded on the assumption&mdash;which would have seemed remote and fantastic
+indeed&mdash;that a city council could be improved. Parlor lectures on civics
+were of course still farther in the future. Poor government was simply a
+permanent disability, like weather, or lameness, or the fashions; folk
+must get along as best they could in spite of it. The town remained a
+chaos of maladministration and of non-administration; but when the
+decencies are, for the time being, despaired of, one may still try for
+the luxuries. So the city girded itself for a great festival; the nation
+approved and co&ouml;perated, and a vast congeries of white palaces began to
+rise on our far edge.</p>
+
+<p>The detailed execution of this immense undertaking was largely local, of
+course. Though the work was initiated by older heads (some of them were
+too old and were dropped), there were places on the innumerable
+committees for younger ones&mdash;for men in their early thirties; their
+vigor, enthusiasm, and even initiative (within understood<a class="pagenum" title="123" name="page_123" id="page_123"></a> limits) would
+greatly further the cause. There were (among others) committees on
+entertainment to engage the services of young men of position, leisure,
+and social experience. There were many foreign dignitaries to be
+received and guided; there must be lively and presentable youths to help
+man&oelig;uvre them. Raymond, who was supposed to have mingled in European
+society (instead of having viewed it from afar, in detachment), was
+asked to serve in this field.</p>
+
+<p>There were equally good opportunities for brisk, aggressive young men on
+finance committees and such-like bodies, wherein prominent sexagenarians
+did the heavily ornamental and allowed good scope for younger men who
+had begun to get a record and who wished to confirm ability in
+influential eyes. This opened a road for John W. McComas, who made a
+record, indeed, in the matter of gathering local subscriptions. He
+dented the consciousness of several important men in his own field, and
+got praised in the press for his indefatigability and his powers of
+persuasion. Before the six months of festivity<a class="pagenum" title="124" name="page_124" id="page_124"></a> were half over, our
+Johnny had become a "prominent citizen" and his new bank almost a
+household word.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond did less well. The great organization was an executive
+hierarchy: ranks and rows of officials, with due heed not only to
+co&ouml;rdination but to subordination. Some men do their best under such
+conditions; others, their worst. Raymond, a strong individualist, a
+pronounced egoist, could not "fall in." Even in his simple field&mdash;one
+concerned chiefly with but the outward flourishes&mdash;the big machine irked
+and embarrassed him. He withdrew. When an imperial prince was publicly
+"received," with ceremonies that mingled old-world formalities (however
+lamely followed) and local inspirations (however poorly disciplined),
+the moving event went off with no help of his: I believe he even smiled
+at it all from a balcony.</p>
+
+<p>It was here that Raymond began to make clear his true type. He was
+Goethe's "bad citizen"&mdash;the man who is unable to command and unwilling
+to obey.<a class="pagenum" title="125" name="page_125" id="page_125"></a></p>
+
+<p>After a particularly flamboyant appreciation of McComas's services in a
+Sunday newspaper, I ventured to touch on our Johnny's rise in Raymond's
+hearing. The two had not met for years; and Johnny had probably no
+greater place in Raymond's mind than Raymond, as I remembered once
+finding, had in Johnny's. But Raymond did not yet pretend to overlook or
+to forget or to ignore him; nor did he yet allow himself to mention
+Johnny as a one-time dweller in his father's stable.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes," said Raymond; "he seems to be coming on fast. Climbing like
+anything."</p>
+
+<p>This, I felt, was disapproval, slightly tinctured with contempt. But
+there are two kinds of progress on a ladder or a stairway. There is the
+climbing up, and there is (as we sometimes let ourselves say) the
+climbing down.</p>
+
+<p>It was at the imperial reception that Raymond and Johnny finally met.
+Let us figure Raymond as descending from his satirical balcony, and
+Johnny, with his wife, as earnestly working his way up the great
+stairway&mdash;the<a class="pagenum" title="126" name="page_126" id="page_126"></a> <i>scalone</i>, as Italy had taught Raymond to call it. This
+was an ample affair with an elaborate handrail, whose function was
+nullified by potted plants, and with a commodious landing, whose corners
+contained many thickset palms. A crowd swarmed up; a crowd swarmed down;
+the hundreds were congested among the palms. Johnny, with his wife on
+his arm, was robust and hearty, and smiled on things in general as he
+fought their way up. He took the occasion as he took any other occasion:
+much for granted, but with a certain air of richly belonging and of
+worthily fitting in. His wife&mdash;"I suppose it was his wife," said
+Raymond&mdash;was elaborately gowned and in high feather: a successful
+delegate of luxury. Obviously an occasion of this sort was precisely
+what she had long been waiting for. Despite the press about her, she
+made her costume and her carriage tell for all they might. A triumphing
+couple, even Raymond was obliged to concede. The acme of team work....</p>
+
+<p>"There we were&mdash;stuck in the crowd," said Raymond, whose one desire
+seemed to<a class="pagenum" title="127" name="page_127" id="page_127"></a> have been to gain the street. "Not too close, fortunately. I
+had to bow, but I didn't have to speak; and I didn't have to be
+'presented.' He gave me quite a nod."</p>
+
+<p>And no great exercise of imagination was required for me to see how
+distant and reserved was Raymond's bow in return.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="IV_2488" id="IV_2488"></a>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>That autumn, after the festal flags had ceased their flaunting and fire
+had made a wide sweep over the white palaces, Raymond suddenly went
+abroad. It was to be a stay of three or four months. He first wrote me
+from Paris.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote again in December, also from Paris, and told me <i>tout court</i>
+that he was engaged to be married. I give this news to you as suddenly
+as he gave it to me.</p>
+
+<p>You can supply motives as easily as I. His parents were gone and his
+family life was <i>nil</i>. The old house was large and lonely. You may
+believe him influenced, if you like, by his last view of Johnny McComas
+and by Johnny's amazing effect of completeness<a class="pagenum" title="128" name="page_128" id="page_128"></a> and content. You may
+fancy him as visited by compunctions and mortifications due to his
+consciousness of his own futility. Or you may fall back upon the simple
+and general promptings that are smoothly current in the minds of us all.
+My own notion, however, is this: he never would have married at home;
+only an insidious whiff of romance, encountered in France or Italy,
+could have accomplished his undoing.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond's own advices were meagre. "Your emotional participation not
+particularly desired"&mdash;such seemed to be the message that lay invisible
+between his few lines. But other correspondents supplied the <i>lacun&aelig;</i>.
+He was to marry a girl whose family formed part of the American colony
+in the French capital. At least, the feminine members of the family were
+there: the mother, and an elder sister. The father, according to a
+custom that still provoked Gallic comment, was elsewhere: he was
+following the markets in America. The bride-to-be was between nineteen
+and twenty. Raymond himself was thirty-three.<a class="pagenum" title="129" name="page_129" id="page_129"></a></p>
+
+<p>He advised me, later, that the wedding would take place at the end of
+February and requested me to obtain and forward some of the quaint
+documents demanded at such a juncture by the French authorities. He
+added that he hoped for a honeymoon in Italy, but that his fianc&eacute;e
+favored Biarritz and Pau.</p>
+
+<p>The wedding came off at one of the American churches in Paris. It was a
+sumptuous ceremonial, aided by a bishop (who was on his travels, but who
+had not forgotten to bring along his vestments) and by the attendance of
+half the colony. Raymond was obliged to put up with all this pomp and
+show, much as it ran counter to his tastes and inclinations. But
+fortunately he was made even less of than most young men on such an
+occasion; he had few connections on either side of the water, so the
+bride's connections dominated the day and made her the chief figure
+still more completely than is commonly the case. And the honeymoon was
+spent, not in the north of Italy, but in the south of France.<a class="pagenum" title="130" name="page_130" id="page_130"></a></p>
+
+<p>There are times when a young girl must have her way. And there are times
+when a young husband (but not so young) will determine to have his. I
+knew Raymond.</p>
+
+<p>The couple were in no haste to get home. The four months ran to almost a
+year. I first met the new wife at a reception in the early autumn.</p>
+
+<p>"Gertrude," said Raymond, "let me present to you my old friend&mdash;" H'm!
+let me see: what <i>is</i> my name?&mdash;Oh, yes: "Gertrude, let me present to
+you my old friend, George Waite."</p>
+
+<p>Can a young bride, dressed in black, and dressed rather simply too, look
+almost wicked? Well, this one contrived to.</p>
+
+<p>The effect was not due to her face, which had an expression of na&iuml;ve
+sophistication, or of sophisticated na&iuml;vet&eacute;, not at all likely to
+mislead the mature; nor to her carriage, which, though slightly
+self-conscious, was modest enough, and not a bit too demure. It was due
+to her dress, which, after all, was not quite so simple, either in
+intention or in execution, as it seemed. It was black, and<a class="pagenum" title="131" name="page_131" id="page_131"></a> black only;
+and it was trimmed with black jet or spangles or passementerie or
+whatever&mdash;let some one else find the name. It was cut close, and it was
+cut low; too close and too low&mdash;she was the young married woman with a
+vengeance. It took a tone and bespoke a tradition to which most of us
+were as yet strangers, and our initiation into a new and equivocal realm
+had been too sudden for our powers of adjustment. It was Paris in its
+essence&mdash;the thing in itself&mdash;and it had all come unedited through the
+hands of a mother and a sister who were so rapt or so subservient as to
+be incapable of offering opposition to the full pungency of the Parisian
+evangel, and of hushing down an emphatic text for acceptance in a more
+quiet environment. I can only say that several nice young chaps looked
+once and then looked away. Raymond himself was inconvenienced. Nor did
+matters mend when, within a week or so, Mrs. Raymond Prince began to
+rate the women of her new circle as "homespun."</p>
+
+<p>Her little hand fell most heavily on these<a class="pagenum" title="132" name="page_132" id="page_132"></a> poor aborigines when two or
+three members of Raymond's singing-class loyally came to one of her own
+receptions. These Adeles and Gertrudes of the earlier day were now wives
+and mothers, with the interests proper to such. They had shepherded
+babies through croup and diphtheria, and were now seeing husky,
+wholesome boys and girls of twelve and thirteen through the primary
+schools. When among themselves, they talked of servants and husbands.
+They had not married and gone West or East; they had married at home,
+and they had stayed at home. They had had too many things on their hands
+and minds to catch up much of the recent exoticism stirring about them
+here in town, and they were far from able to cope with this recent
+importation of exoticism from the Rue de la Paix.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond came home, one afternoon, in time for the last half-hour of his
+wife's last reception. Her dress, on this occasion, was quite as daring,
+in its way, as on the other, and original to the point of the bizarre.
+One of the early Adeles was leaving, but she<a class="pagenum" title="133" name="page_133" id="page_133"></a> stopped for a moment and
+attempted speech. She was the particular Adele with the piercing soprano
+voice&mdash;a voice which had since lowered itself to sing lullabies to three
+successive infants.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Raymond&mdash;" she began hopefully, and stopped. She tried again, but
+failed; and she passed on and out with her words unsaid.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Raymond&mdash;" Yes, I am afraid that that was the impression of more
+early friends than one.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="V_2603" id="V_2603"></a>
+<h2>V</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Raymond had expected, of course, to give his wife her own way at the
+beginning&mdash;at the very beginning, that is; and he had expected, equally,
+to have her make a definite impression on the circle awaiting her. But&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Well, he had intended to "take her in hand," and to do it soon. She was
+to be formed, or re-formed; she was to be adjusted, both to things in
+general and to himself especially. Besides being her husband, he was<a class="pagenum" title="134" name="page_134" id="page_134"></a> to
+be her kindly elder brother, her monitor, patient but firm; she was to
+enter upon a state of tutelage. He was pretty certain to be right in all
+his views, opinions and practices; and she, if her views, opinions and
+practices were at variance with his, was pretty certain to be in the
+wrong. He assumed that, during those few years in Paris, she had learned
+it all in one big lesson only. The time had been too short to confirm
+all this sudden instruction into a reasoned and assimilated way of life;
+by no means had that superficial miscellany been rubbed into the warp
+and woof of her being. The Parisian top-dressing would be removed and
+the essential subsoil be exposed and tilled....</p>
+
+<p>H'm!</p>
+
+<p>One of the strongest of her early impressions was naturally that of the
+house in which she was to live. It was big and roomy; it was detached,
+and thus open to light and air. But its elephantine woodwork repelled
+her, for she had grown up amid the rococo exuberances of Paris
+apartments. The heavy honesty of black-walnut depressed her after<a class="pagenum" title="135" name="page_135" id="page_135"></a> the
+gilded stucco of her mother's salon. And that huge, portentous
+orchestrion took up such an immensity of room!</p>
+
+<p>I doubt if the neighborhood itself pleased her much better, though it
+was homogeneous (in its way), and dignified, and enjoyed an exceptional
+measure of quietude. Perhaps it was too quiet, after some years of a
+balcony on a boulevard. And it is true that some of the big houses were
+vacant, and that some of the families roundabout went away too often and
+stayed away too long. An empty house is a dead house, and when doors and
+windows are boarded up you may say the dead house is laid out. Things
+were sometimes <i>triste</i>&mdash;the French for final condemnation. The exodus
+so long foreshadowed seemed appreciably under way. This Gertrude became
+increasingly conscious, as the months went on, that most of the people
+she wanted to see and most of the houses she was prompted to frequent
+were miles away, and that the flood-tide of business rolled between.</p>
+
+<p>Of her reaction to the circle in which she<a class="pagenum" title="136" name="page_136" id="page_136"></a> first found herself I have
+given you one or two indications. It would be easy, as it would be
+customary, to give some other of her early social experiences in detail
+and her reactions to them; but my interest is frankly in her husband and
+in his reactions. It was of him, too, that I saw the most; and I have
+never gone greatly into society.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of a long and possibly somewhat dull winter his wife began to
+hint the advantageousness of transferring themselves to that other part
+of town. Raymond was not precisely in the position where he cared to pay
+high rent for a small house, while a big house was standing empty and
+unrealizable. Pouts; frowns.... But nature came to his aid. With a new
+young life soon to appear above the horizon, now was no time to shift.
+His son should be born in the house in which he ought to be born. A
+reasonable view, on the whole; and it prevailed.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond had said "son," and son it was. The baby was not named Raymond:
+his father, however much of an egoist, was not<a class="pagenum" title="137" name="page_137" id="page_137"></a> willing to put himself
+forward as such so obviously, nor for a period that promised to be
+indefinitely long. Nor was the baby called Bartholomew, after his
+maternal grandfather in the East: for who cared to inflict such an
+old-fashioned, four-syllable name on such a small morsel of flesh? He
+entered the battle under the neutral and not over-colorful pennon of
+Albert: his mother could thus call him "Bertie," and think, not too
+remotely, of her parent on the stock exchange.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond was not long in discovering, after reaching home, what
+sacrifices the new life was to involve. On the Continent, in the midst
+of change and stir, these had not foretold themselves. Back in his own
+house, his interests&mdash;"intellectual interests" he called them&mdash;began to
+assert themselves in the old way. But he was no longer free to range the
+fields of the mind and take shots at the arts as they rose. Least of all
+was he to read in the evening. That was to neglect, to affront. However,
+the arrival of little Albert&mdash;poor tad!&mdash;changed the current of his
+wife's own interests and helped to place<a class="pagenum" title="138" name="page_138" id="page_138"></a> one more rather vital matter
+in abeyance. He was to live&mdash;for a while, anyway&mdash;in his present home;
+and he was to pursue&mdash;for a while, anyway&mdash;some of the accustomed
+interests of his bachelor days. He expected that, before long, his wife
+would accept his environment and the practices he had always followed
+within it. She needed enlightenment on many points. He had already
+communicated some of his views on dress, for example; and he had
+readjusted her notions on the preparation of salads. He gave her, pretty
+constantly, corrective glances through, or over, his eyeglasses,&mdash;for
+his sight had begun to weaken early, as his father had foreseen,&mdash;and he
+meant that such glances should count. She required to be edited; well,
+the new manuscript was worth his pains, and would be highly creditable
+in its revised version.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="VI_2698" id="VI_2698"></a>
+<h2>VI</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>If one advantage showed forth from a situation that seemed, in general,
+not altogether promising, it was this: Raymond,<a class="pagenum" title="139" name="page_139" id="page_139"></a> hearing his native town
+commented upon unfavorably by his wife,&mdash;who was keen and constant in
+her criticisms,&mdash;began to defend it. It was one thing for the
+native-born to pick flaws; it was another when that ungracious work was
+attempted by a newcomer. And he meant not only to defend it, but to
+remain in it, though his wife had married him partly on the strength of
+his European predilections, and largely on the assumption that a good
+part of their married life would be spent abroad. He even began to
+wonder if he might not join in and help improve things. Like most of his
+fellow-townsmen, he regarded the city's participation in the late
+national festival as a great step in advance,&mdash;the first of many like
+steps soon to follow. The day after the Fair was late; but better to be
+late than never. Really, there was hope for the Big Black Botch. More
+and more he felt inclined to lessen still further its lessening
+enormity. After all, this town was the town of his birth: and a
+fundamental egoism cried out that it should be more worthy of him. He
+recalled a group of American<a class="pagenum" title="140" name="page_140" id="page_140"></a> women&mdash;Easterners&mdash;whom, during his first
+trip abroad, he had caught poring over the guest-book of a hotel in
+Sorrento. He was the last male arrival in a slow season; he seemed
+interesting and promising; evidently they had had hopes. "But," asked
+one of them, "how is it you are willing to register openly from such a
+town as that?"&mdash;and Raymond had felt the sting. "Such nerve, such
+bumptiousness!" he said to me in recalling that query some years later.
+But he did not add that he had tried to deliver any <i>riposte</i>. Instead
+he was now to make a belated return at home, where effort most counted.
+The years immediately to come were to be full of new openings and
+opportunities; in his own way, and under his peculiar handicaps, he was
+to try to take some advantage of them.<a class="pagenum" title="141" name="page_141" id="page_141"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="PART_V_2735" id="PART_V_2735"></a>
+<h2>PART V</h2>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="I_2741" id="I_2741"></a>
+<h2>I</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Little Albert's babyhood kept his mother a good deal at home&mdash;and by
+"home" I mean the house in which he had been born. His father's lessened
+interest in Europe (and his diminished deference for it) kept his mother
+at home completely&mdash;and by "home" I now mean the town in which Albert
+had been born. Father, mother, and offspring filled the big house as
+well as they could&mdash;the big, <i>old</i> house as it was sometimes called by
+those who cherished a chronology that was purely American; and Albert
+was more than a year and a half along in life before his grandmother
+came across to see him and to inspect the distant <i>m&eacute;nage</i>. She brought
+her water-waves and her sharpened critical sense, and went back leaving
+the impression that she was artificial and exacting.<a class="pagenum" title="142" name="page_142" id="page_142"></a></p>
+
+<p>"She missed her Paris," said Raymond, "and her drive in the Bois."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm!" said I, recalling that the town's recent chief executive had
+pronounced us, not many years back, the equal of Paris in civic beauty.</p>
+
+<p>"We have no Bois, as yet," he added, thoughtfully. "Do you think we ever
+shall have one?"</p>
+
+<p>He was revolving the Bois, not as a definite tract of park land, but as
+a social institution.</p>
+
+<p>"I think," said I, "that we had better be satisfied with developing
+according to our own nature and needs."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he returned; "there was the Frenchman at the fox-hunt: 'No band,
+no promenade, no nossing.' Well, we must go on our own tack, as soon as
+we discover it."</p>
+
+<p>It need not be imagined that his mother-in-law's look-in of a month made
+his wife more contented. She kept on wishing for her new friends in
+another quarter, and (more strongly) for the familiar scenes of the
+other side. Raymond did not wish the expense involved in either move.
+His affairs were<a class="pagenum" title="143" name="page_143" id="page_143"></a> now going but tolerably. So far as the bank was
+concerned&mdash;a bank that had once been almost a "family" institution&mdash;his
+influence was naught. He was only a stockholder, and a smaller
+stockholder than once. His interest, in any sense, was but a brief,
+periodical interest in dividends. These were coming with a commendable
+regularity still. His rentals came in fairly too; but most of them were
+now derived from properties on the edge of the business
+district&mdash;properties with no special future and likely only to hold
+their own however favorable general conditions might continue. Travel?
+No. A man travels best in his youth, when he is foot-free, care-free,
+fancy-free. Go traveling too late, or once too often, and there is a
+difference. The final checking-off of something one has "always meant to
+see" may result in the most ashen disappointment of all: even intuition,
+without the pains of actual experience, should suffice to warn. Besides,
+as Raymond said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"We've both had a good deal of it. Let's stay at home."<a class="pagenum" title="144" name="page_144" id="page_144"></a></p>
+
+<p>His wife cast about her. There is a mood in which a deprivation of high
+comedy may drive one to low-down farce. To-day people are even going
+farther. A worthy stage is dead, they say; and they patronize, somewhat
+willfully and contemptuously (or with a loose, slack tolerance that is
+worse), the moving pictures. Perhaps it was in some such mood that
+Raymond's wife took up with Mrs. Johnny McComas. They were but three
+streets apart. Mrs. McComas was lively, energetic, determined to drive
+on; and her ability to assimilate rapidly and light-handedly her growing
+opulence made it seem by no means a mere vulgar external adornment. She
+knew how to move among the remarkable furnishings with which she had
+surrounded herself in that old-new house, and how to make the momentum
+gained there serve her ends in the world outside.</p>
+
+<p>"It will be a short life here," her husband had told her on their taking
+possession; "then, a quick sale&mdash;at a good figure&mdash;to some manufacturing
+concern, and on we go."</p>
+
+<p>"If it's to be short, let's make it merry,"<a class="pagenum" title="145" name="page_145" id="page_145"></a> she had rejoined; and
+nothing had been spared that could give liveliness to their stately old
+interiors, while those interiors lasted.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Raymond Prince vaguely pronounced their house "amusing." It had,
+like Adele McComas herself, a provocative dash which fell in with her
+present mood, and it pleased her that its ch&acirc;telaine was inclined to
+dress up to its wayward sofas and hangings. She even went with Mrs.
+Johnny on shopping tours and abetted her as her fancies, desires and
+expenditures ran riot. It was a mood of irresponsibility&mdash;almost of
+defiant irresponsibility.</p>
+
+<p>Now was the nascent day of the country club. Several of these welcome
+institutions had lately set themselves up in a modest, tentative way.
+Acceptance was complete, and all they had to do was to grow. With one of
+these McComas cast his lot. At the start it was a simple enough affair;
+but Johnny must have sensed its potentialities and savored its
+affinities, its coming congruity with himself. It was to become,
+shortly, a club for<a class="pagenum" title="146" name="page_146" id="page_146"></a> the suddenly, violently rich, the flushed with
+dollars, the congested with prosperity&mdash;for newcomers who had met
+Success and beaten her at her own game. Stir on all hands, the reek of
+sudden felicity in the air. In later years people with access to better
+things of similar sort were known to become indignant when asked to
+associate themselves with it. "Why should <i>I</i> want to join <i>that</i>?" was
+the question they put. But it pleased Johnny McComas, both by its
+present manifestations and its latent possibilities. It was richly in
+unison with his own nature, and I believe he had a ravishing vision of
+its magnificent futurities.</p>
+
+<p>Last year my wife and I were taken to a Sunday afternoon concert out
+there. We found a place of towers and arcades, of endless corridors
+planted with columns and numberless chairs in numberless varieties, of
+fountained courts, of ball-rooms, of concert-halls, of gay apparel and
+cool drinks. We heard of fairs, horse-shows, tournaments in golf and
+tennis. The restaurant, with its acre of tables, glassed and naperied;
+the ranges of<a class="pagenum" title="147" name="page_147" id="page_147"></a> telephone booths, all going it together; the cellars, a
+vast subterrene, with dusky avenues of lockers, each cluttered with
+beverages of individual predilection&mdash;though I suppose that, after all,
+they were a good deal alike....</p>
+
+<p>Well, it was too much for us; and my Elsie, who is essentially the lady,
+if woman ever was, came away feeling a little dowdy and a good deal out
+of date.</p>
+
+<p>At that earlier period, however, it was still simple; the germ was
+there, but the development of its possibilities had only begun. When
+Mrs. McComas invited Mrs. Prince to drive out with her and see some
+tennis, Mrs. Prince was quite ready to accept.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know just what mode of locomotion they employed. It was in the
+early days of the automobile and Johnny McComas was one of the first men
+in town to have one. I recall, in fact, some of his initial experiences
+with it. On a Sunday afternoon I encountered him in one of these still
+relatively unstudied contraptions on a frequented driveway. Another man
+was sitting beside him patiently. The conveyance was making no progress
+at<a class="pagenum" title="148" name="page_148" id="page_148"></a> all. Fortunately it had stopped close enough to the curb not to
+interfere with the progress of other and more familiar equipages.</p>
+
+<p>"We're stuck," said Johnny, jovially, as he caught sight of me. "Ran for
+three or four miles slick as a whistle&mdash;and look at us now!" It
+entertained him&mdash;a kink in a new toy. And he enjoyed the interest of the
+people collected about.</p>
+
+<p>"You're gummed up, I expect," said I. In those days nobody knew much
+about the new creature and its habits, and one man's guess was as good
+as another's. Two or three bystanders eyed me deferentially, as a
+probable expert.</p>
+
+<p>"Likely enough," he agreed&mdash;and that made me an expert beyond doubt.
+"But this will do for to-day. We've been here twenty minutes."</p>
+
+<p>He had the car pushed to a near-by stable, amidst the mixed emotions of
+the little crowd, and next day he had it hauled home.</p>
+
+<p>"You were right," he said, when I met him out again in it, a week later.
+"It <i>was</i> gummed up, so to speak; but it's working like a charm<a class="pagenum" title="149" name="page_149" id="page_149"></a> to-day.
+Get in and I'll take you a few miles. That other fellow got an awful
+grouch."</p>
+
+<p>It may have been by this machine, or by some more familiar mode of
+locomotion, that the two women reached the country club and its tennis
+tournament. Gertrude Prince strolled through its grounds and galleries
+with the aloof and amused air of one touring through a foreign town&mdash;a
+town never seen before and likely to be left behind altogether within an
+hour or two. It was at once semi-smart and semi-simple. She took it
+lightly, even condescendingly; and when Johnny McComas himself appeared
+somewhat later and set them down at a little marble table near a
+fountain-jet and offered cocktails as a preliminary to a variety of
+sandwiches, she decided, after looking about and seeing a few other
+ladies with glasses before them on other little marble tables, to
+accept. It was a lark in some town of the provinces&mdash;Meaux or Melun;
+what difference did it make?</p>
+
+<p>They formed a little group altogether to Johnny's liking. His wife was
+dressed dashingly; his wife's guest made a very fair second;<a class="pagenum" title="150" name="page_150" id="page_150"></a> he
+himself, although he never lifted a racquet, was in the tennis garb of
+that day.</p>
+
+<p>"You both look ripping," he declared with hearty satisfaction. To look
+thus, before competing items in the throng, was the object of the place,
+the reason for its developing <i>mise en sc&egrave;ne</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny himself looked ripping&mdash;cool, confident, content, and at the top
+of his days.</p>
+
+<p>"It was amusing...." said Gertrude to me, with an upward inflection, a
+week later.</p>
+
+<p>And she asked me for more about Johnny McComas.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="II_2926" id="II_2926"></a>
+<h2>II</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>If those were days when people began to combine for the pursuit of
+pleasure, they were also days when people began to gather at the call of
+public duty. If clubs were forming on the borders, other clubs, leagues,
+societies were forming nearer the centre&mdash;organizations to make
+effective the scattered good-will of the well-disposed and to gain some
+betterment in the local political life. To initiate and conduct such
+movements only a few were<a class="pagenum" title="151" name="page_151" id="page_151"></a> needed; but the many were expected to
+contribute, if not their zeal and their time, at least their dollars. It
+was patriotic righteousness made easy: a man had only to give his fifty
+dollars or his five hundred to feel, without further personal exertion,
+that he was a good citizen and was forwarding, as all good citizens
+should, a worthy cause. This way of doing it fell in wonderfully well
+with Raymond's temperament and abilities (or lack of them): the
+liberality of his contributions did not remain unknown, and he was
+sometimes held up as a favorable specimen of the American citizen.</p>
+
+<p>Another movement was soon to engage his attention. If the prosperous
+were to have their playgrounds beyond the city's outskirts, the less
+prosperous should have theirs within the city's limits. The scheme of a
+system of small parks and playgrounds quite took Raymond's fancy. It
+contained, besides the idea of social amelioration, the even more
+grateful idea of municipal beautification. In time, indeed, might not
+this same notion, fortified by experience and given a wider<a class="pagenum" title="152" name="page_152" id="page_152"></a>
+application, end by redeeming the town not merely in spots but in its
+entirety?&mdash;a saved and graced whole, not only as to its heart, but as to
+its liberal and varied borders of water, woodland and prairie.</p>
+
+<p>"I should be proud of that," said Raymond heartily. The name of such a
+city, following one's own name on any hotel-register, would indeed be a
+matter for pride.</p>
+
+<p>He attended several of the early meetings that were designed to get some
+such project, in its simpler form, under way. He had friends among
+professional men in the arts, and some acquaintances among newly formed
+bodies of social workers. He was not slow in perceiving that the way was
+likely to be tedious and hard. It called for organization&mdash;the
+organization of hope, of patience, of hot, untiring zeal, of <i>finesse</i>
+against political chicane, of persistence in the face of indifference
+and selfishness. "It will take years of organized endeavor," he
+confessed. He recognized his own ineffectiveness beyond the narrow pale
+of hopeful suggestion, and wished that here too the giving of a
+substantial sum&mdash;a<a class="pagenum" title="153" name="page_153" id="page_153"></a> large penny-in-the-slot&mdash;might produce quick and
+facile results.</p>
+
+<p>His wife, it is to be feared, looked upon these activities of his,
+however slight, with a lack-lustre eye. She knew nothing of local
+problems and local needs. She was conscious of a hortatory manner in
+small matters and of indifference, which she almost made neglect, in
+matters that appeared to her to be larger. If she asked for a fairer
+share in his evenings&mdash;he belonged to a literary club, a musical
+society, and so on&mdash;it was scant consolation to be told that he objected
+to some of her own activities and associations. He did not much care,
+for example, to have her "run" with the McComases and others of that
+type or to have her dawdle over glasses, tall, broad, or short, in
+places of general democratic assemblage; and he told her so. I believe
+it was about here that she began to find him something of a prig and a
+doctrinaire; and she was not incapable, under provocation, of mentioning
+her impressions. It was about here, I suspect, that he told her
+something of Johnny McComas and his origins&mdash;at least<a class="pagenum" title="154" name="page_154" id="page_154"></a> he once or twice
+spoke of Johnny with a certain sharp scorn to me. He assuredly spoke of
+other country clubs on the other side of town which were more desirable
+for her and equally accessible, save in the material sense of mere
+miles. Though he took no interest in athletics, nor even in the lighter
+out-of-door sports, he was willing to join one of those clubs, if it was
+required of him.</p>
+
+<p>His reference to Johnny McComas was designed, no doubt, to repel her;
+but the effect, as became perfectly apparent, was quite the contrary.
+She was interested, even fascinated, by the rise of a man from so little
+to so much. She found words and words to express her admiration of
+Johnny's type, and when English words ran short she found words in
+French. He was <i>gaillard</i>; he had <i>&eacute;lan</i>. What wasn't he? What hadn't
+he? Bits of bravado, I still incline to think.</p>
+
+<p>No, the McComases were not to be left behind all of a sudden. One day
+she made another excursion to the outskirts with them; and she reported
+it to Raymond, with a little air of suppressed mockery, as a perfectly
+unobjectionable<a class="pagenum" title="155" name="page_155" id="page_155"></a> jaunt. She had gone with them to the cemetery. Johnny's
+mother had died the year before, and he had been putting up a monument
+in Roselands. This structure, it developed, was no mere memorial to an
+individual. It was a tall shaft, set in the middle of a large lot. I saw
+it later myself: a lavish erection (with all its accessory features
+taken into account)&mdash;one designed, as I felt, to show Johnny himself to
+posterity as an ancestor, as the founder of a family line. Assuredly his
+own name, aside from the tall obelisk itself, was the largest thing in
+view.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond took this account of Johnny's latest phase with an admirable
+seriousness; he thought the better of him for it. He himself was
+inclined to divide human-kind into two classes, those who had
+cemetery-lots (with monuments), and those who had not. The latter, of
+course, are in a majority everywhere. One thinks of Naples and of the
+sad road that winds up past the Alhambra to&mdash;Well, yes; in a majority,
+of course; and inevitably so in a large town suddenly thrown<a class="pagenum" title="156" name="page_156" id="page_156"></a> together
+by a heaping up of fortuitous and miscellaneous elements. In later
+years, when things were going rather badly with Raymond, and when
+consideration seemed to fail, he could always comfort himself with
+thoughts of the Princes' own monument in that same cemetery. This was
+another tall shaft in a gray granite now no longer to be found, and had
+been set up by old Jehiel on the occasion of the reinterment of some
+infants by his first wife&mdash;a transaction carried out years before
+Raymond was born. Some of the dates on the base of the monument went
+back to the early thirties. Well, there it stood, with the subordinated
+headstones of Jehiel and old Beulah, of his own parents, and of the
+half-mythical babes who, if they had given nothing else to the world,
+had furnished a future nephew with a social perspective. Raymond,
+reconsidering Johnny's recent effort, now began to disparage that
+improvised background, and led his wife to view his own lot&mdash;theirs,
+hers&mdash;only a hundred yards from the other. But she could not respond to
+old Jehiel and Beulah&mdash;though she tried to be properly<a class="pagenum" title="157" name="page_157" id="page_157"></a> sympathetic over
+their son and his wife. Still less could she vitalize the infants who
+had encountered an epidemic on the prairie frontier and had succumbed
+more than three score years ago. If she thought of any child at all, she
+thought doubtless of little Albert (now romping about in his first tweed
+knickerbockers), who would not die for many years, perhaps, and who was
+like enough to be buried in quite another spot.</p>
+
+<p>But I think she thought, most of all, of the manly, cheerful sorrow of
+Johnny McComas before the new monument in the other lot.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="III_3052" id="III_3052"></a>
+<h2>III</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>These were also days of panic. Banks went down and bank officials threw
+themselves after. The city was thrilled, even charmed, to find that its
+financial perturbations touched, however slightly, the nerves of London
+and Paris. I myself was in Algeria that winter: my Elsie and I had
+decided on three months along the Mediterranean. It was on the white,
+glaring walls of the casino at Biskra that the news was first bulletined
+for our eyes. It had<a class="pagenum" title="158" name="page_158" id="page_158"></a> a glare of its own, I assure you: for a few days
+we knew little enough how we ourselves might be standing.</p>
+
+<p>I thought of the Mid-Continent, with its cumbersome counters and
+partitions done in walnut veneer and its old-fashioned pavement in
+squares of black and white. I thought too of Johnny McComas's new
+institution, with so many bright brass handrails and such a spread of
+tasteful mosaics underfoot. How had they fared? Well, they had fared
+quite differently. Why should a big, old bank go under, while a new,
+little bank continues to float. I cannot tell you. I was far away at the
+time. Perhaps I could not tell you even if I had been on the spot. And
+to other questions, more important still, I may be unable to give, when
+the pinch comes, a clearer answer. The Mid-Continent dashed, or drifted,
+into the rocky hands of a receiver; and McComas's bank, after a
+fortnight of wobbling, righted itself and kept on its way.</p>
+
+<p>I saw Raymond again in March. The receivership was going on languidly.
+Prospects were bright for nobody.<a class="pagenum" title="159" name="page_159" id="page_159"></a></p>
+
+<p>"All this puts an end to <i>one</i> of my plans, anyhow," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"What plan is that?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>I was reminded that these were also the days of a quickened interest in
+education. This interest was expressing itself in large new
+institutions, and these institutions were generously embodying
+themselves in solid stone&mdash;in mullions, groins, gargoyles, finials, and
+the whole volume of approved scholastic detail. Donors were grouping
+themselves in "halls" and dormitories round a certain inchoate campus,
+and were putting on the fronts of their buildings their own names, or
+the names of deceased husbands or wives, fathers or mothers&mdash;so many
+bids for a monumental immortality.</p>
+
+<p>"I had hoped for a Prince Hall," said Raymond. And he explained that it
+would have been in memory of his parents.</p>
+
+<p>I must pause for a moment on this matter. I do not believe that Raymond
+had ever thought, in seriousness, of any such gift. It must have been at
+best an errant fancy, and if concerned with commemorating anybody<a class="pagenum" title="160" name="page_160" id="page_160"></a>
+concerned with commemorating himself. But I will say this for him: he
+never was disposed to try getting things out of people, for he hated
+attempts at trickery almost as much as he detested the exercise of the
+shrewdness involved in bargaining and dickering. Per contra, he often
+showed himself not averse to giving things to other people; but the
+basis for that giving must be clearly understood all round. He would not
+compete; he would not struggle; he would not descend to a war of wits.
+His to bestow, from some serene height; his the r&ocirc;le, in fact, of the
+kindly patron. Let but his own superiority be recognized&mdash;let him only
+be regarded as <i>hors concours</i>&mdash;and he would sometimes deign to do the
+most generous acts. These acts embraced, now and again, the
+entertainment of writers and artists, either at his home or elsewhere:
+his fellows&mdash;for he was a writer and an artist too. But it was all done
+with the understanding that there was a difference: he was a writer and
+an artist&mdash;but he was something more. Those who failed to feel the
+difference were not always bidden a second time.<a class="pagenum" title="161" name="page_161" id="page_161"></a></p>
+
+<p>And his fancy for patronage was developing just at a time when patronage
+was becoming more difficult, awkward, impracticable! But though "Prince
+Hall" never saw the light, other and humbler forms of patronage came to
+be accepted by him.</p>
+
+<p>Toward the end of April Raymond and his wife joined one of the clubs
+which he had brought to her notice. Though in a formative stage, like
+others, it was good (we ourselves joined it some few years later); and
+she made it her concern, through the summer, to give it some of those
+shaping pats which&mdash;for a new club, as for a new vase&mdash;have the greater
+value the earlier they are bestowed. She was active about the place, and
+she became conspicuous.</p>
+
+<p>It was soon seen that she was "gay"&mdash;or was inclined to be, under
+favoring conditions. The conditions were most favoring, it began to be
+felt, when her husband was not about. A good many thought him stiff, and
+a few who used obsolete dictionary words pronounced him proud&mdash;a term
+stately enough to constitute somehow a tribute, though a<a class="pagenum" title="162" name="page_162" id="page_162"></a> damnatory one.
+It was soon seen, too, that just as he irked her, so she disparaged
+him&mdash;an open road to others.</p>
+
+<p>One day she gave a lunch at the club&mdash;places for a dozen. Johnny McComas
+appeared there for the first time. It was a plainer place than his own,
+but I credit him with perceiving that it was much more worth while.
+Adele McComas did not appear&mdash;for a good reason. Those obstreperous
+twins now had a little sister two weeks old. The wife was doubtless
+better at home, but was the husband better at the club? If I had been a
+member at that time, and present, I should have felt like following him
+to some corner of the veranda and saying: "Oh, come, now, Johnny, will
+this quite do?" Well, I know what his look would have been&mdash;it came
+later. He would have turned that wide, round face on me, with the curly
+hair about the temples which gave him somehow an expression of abiding
+youth and frankness; and he would have directed those hard, bright blue
+eyes of his to look straight ahead at me&mdash;eyes that seemed to hold back
+nothing, yet<a class="pagenum" title="163" name="page_163" id="page_163"></a> really told nothing at all; and would have disclaimed any
+wrong-doing or any intention of wrong-doing. And I should have felt
+myself a foolish meddler.</p>
+
+<p>Well, the innocent informalities of the summer were resumed by the same
+set in town next winter. The memories and the methods of one season were
+tided over to another. Gertrude was still "gay"&mdash;perhaps gayer&mdash;and a
+little more openly impatient with her husband, and a little more openly
+disdainful of him. Young men swarmed and fluttered, and those who had
+"never tried it on" before seemed inclined to try it on now.</p>
+
+<p>I take, on the whole, a tempered view&mdash;by which I mean, a favorable
+view&mdash;of our society and its moral tone. I am assured, and I believe
+from my own observations, that this is higher than in some other of our
+large cities. I dislike scandal, and I have no desire to bear tales.
+Either is far from being the object of these present pages. Nothing that
+I present need be taken as typical, as tyrannously representative.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond criticized, expostulated. Friends<a class="pagenum" title="164" name="page_164" id="page_164"></a> began to come to him with
+impressions and reports. I&mdash;whether for good or ill&mdash;was not one of
+these. They named names&mdash;names which I shall not record here. But it was
+one of Raymond's own impressions, and a vivid one, which finally
+prompted him to make a move.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="IV_3178" id="IV_3178"></a>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>January found the social life of the town in full swing. We had
+recovered from last year's financial jolt, and entertaining was
+constant. Raymond and his wife were invited out a good deal. He was
+bored by it all; but his wife remained interested and indefatigable.
+Finally came a dance at one of the great houses. Raymond rebelled, and
+refused point-blank to go: an evening in his library was his mood. His
+wife protested, cajoled, and he finally found a reason for giving in.</p>
+
+<p>As I say, they were bidden to one of the great houses&mdash;one of the few
+that possessed an actual fa&ccedil;ade, a central court, and a big staircase:
+it had too its galleries of paintings<a class="pagenum" title="165" name="page_165" id="page_165"></a> and of Oriental curios before
+Oriental curios became too common. Its owner was also, with the rest, a
+musical amateur. He was a man of forty-five, and like Raymond had a wife
+too many years younger than himself for his own comfort. This lively
+lady lived on fiddles and horns&mdash;dancing was an inexhaustible pleasure.
+At her dancing-parties, of which she gave three or four a season, her
+husband would show himself below for a few moments for civility's sake,
+and then retire to a remote den on an upper floor, well shut out from
+the sounds of his wife's frivolous measures, but accessible to a few
+habitu&eacute;s of age and tastes approximating his own.</p>
+
+<p>The question of music of another quality and to another purpose was in
+the air&mdash;it was a matter of endowing and housing an orchestra. Informal
+<i>pour-parlers</i> were under way in various quarters, and Raymond felt
+disposed, and even able, to contribute in a modest measure. It was his
+pride to have been asked, and it was his pride, despite untoward
+conditions, to put up a good front and do as much as he could. An hour's
+confab<a class="pagenum" title="166" name="page_166" id="page_166"></a> over cigarettes in that retired little den might clarify one
+atmosphere, if not another.</p>
+
+<p>The court and its staircase were set with palms, as is the ineluctable
+wont on such occasions and for such places; and people, between the
+dances, or during them, were brushing the fronds aside as they thronged
+the galleries round the court to see the Barbizon masters then in vogue
+and the Chinese jades. As Raymond passed down the stairway, he met his
+wife coming up on the arm of Johnny McComas.</p>
+
+<p>"She looked self-conscious," Raymond said to me, a few days after. I
+told him that he had seen only what he was expecting to see.</p>
+
+<p>"And he looked too beastly self-satisfied." I told him that of late I
+had seldom seen Johnny look any other way.</p>
+
+<p>"Where was his wife?" he asked. I told him she might easily be in the
+crowd on some other man's arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Why were they there at all?" he demanded. And I did not tell him that
+probably they were there through his own wife's good offices.<a class="pagenum" title="167" name="page_167" id="page_167"></a></p>
+
+<p>That meeting on the stairs!&mdash;he made a grievance of it, an injury. The
+earlier meeting, with Johnny's own wife on his arm, had annoyed him as a
+general assertion of prosperity. This present meeting, with Raymond
+Prince's wife on Johnny's arm, exasperated him as a challenging
+assertion of power and predominance.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall act," Raymond declared.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing rash," said I. "Nothing unconsidered, I hope."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall act," he repeated. And he set his jaw more decisively than a
+strong man always finds necessary.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="V_3246" id="V_3246"></a>
+<h2>V</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Raymond's mind was turning more and more to a set scene with McComas;
+some meeting between them was, to his notion, a <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>. It
+seemed demanded by a Gallic sense of form: it must be gone through with
+as a requisite to his r&ocirc;le of offended husband.</p>
+
+<p>One difficulty was that Raymond fluctuated daily, almost hourly, in his
+view of his<a class="pagenum" title="168" name="page_168" id="page_168"></a> wife&mdash;of <i>the</i> wife, I may say. To-day he took the old
+view: the wife was her husband's property and any attempt on her was a
+deadly injury to him. To-morrow he took the newer view: the wife was an
+individual human being and a free moral agent; therefore a lapse, while
+it meant disgrace for her, was, for him, but an affront which he must
+endure with dignified composure.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the pair saw little of each other, and Albert, puzzled, began
+to enter upon his opportunity (a wide and lingering one it became) for
+learning adjustment to awkward and disconcerting conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Well, Raymond had his meeting. Imagine whether it was agreeable. Imagine
+whether it was agreeable to me, in whose office it was held. Raymond had
+the difficult part of one who must act because he has deliberately
+committed himself to action, yet has no sure ground to act upon, and
+therefore no line to take with real effect. It was here and now that
+McComas turned his round face foursquare to his uncertain accuser, and
+let loose a steady, unspeaking stare from those hard<a class="pagenum" title="169" name="page_169" id="page_169"></a> blue eyes, and
+declared that nothing had occurred upon which an accusation could justly
+be based. He was emphatic; and he was blunt; the son and grandson of a
+rustic.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing, he said. Had there really been nothing? You are entitled to
+ask. And I might be inclined to answer, if I knew. I simply don't. I was
+in position to know something, to know much; but everything?&mdash;no.</p>
+
+<p>Think, if you please, of the many domestic situations which must pass
+without the full light of detailed knowledge&mdash;knowledge that comes too
+late, or never comes at all. Consider the simple, willful girl who
+marries impulsively on the assumption that the new acquaintance is a
+bachelor. Cases have been known where it developed that he was not.
+Consider the phrase of the marriage service, "if any of you know just
+cause or impediment": who can declare that, in a given instance, some
+impediment, moral if not legal, might not be brought against either
+contracting party, however trustful the other? Consider the story of the
+anxious American mother who, alarmed by reports about a<a class="pagenum" title="170" name="page_170" id="page_170"></a> fascinating
+scoundrel under whom her daughter was studying music somewhere in
+mid-Europe, went abroad alone to investigate. Her letter to the awaiting
+father, back home, ran for page after page on non-essentials and dealt
+with the real point only in a brief, embarrassed, bewildered postscript
+of one line: "Oh, William, <i>I don't know</i>!" Neither do I "know." But my
+account of later events may help you to decide the question for
+yourselves.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond had set his mind on a divorce. If grounds could not be found in
+one quarter, they must be found in another. If McComas, that prime
+figure, was unable to bring aid, then there must be co&ouml;peration among
+the other and lesser figures. Raymond revived and reviewed the tales
+that had involved several younger men. The more he dwelt on them, the
+more inflamed he became, and the more certain that he had been wronged.</p>
+
+<p>I did not accompany him through his proceedings&mdash;such advice as I had
+given him near the beginning was the advice simply of a friend. My own
+part of the great field of<a class="pagenum" title="171" name="page_171" id="page_171"></a> the law is a relatively unimpassioned
+one&mdash;office-work involving real-estate, conveyancing, loans, and the
+like. I suggested to Raymond the proper counsel for the particular case,
+and there, for a while, I left him.</p>
+
+<p>His wife's parents came on from the East. The mother, after some years
+abroad, had lately resumed her domestic duties in the land of her birth.
+The father, who knew all of one subject, and nothing of any other,
+detached himself for a week or two from the one worthy interest in life
+and accompanied her. The "street" was still there when he returned. They
+seemed experienced and worldly-wise in their respective fields and their
+respective aspects, but they entered upon this new matter with a poor
+grace. Here was another mother who did not quite "know," and another
+father who waited, at a second remove, for definite knowledge that did
+not quite come. First there were maladroit attempts to bring a
+reconciliation; and afterwards, and more shrewdly, endeavors to gain as
+much as possible for their daughter from the wreck.<a class="pagenum" title="172" name="page_172" id="page_172"></a></p>
+
+<p>Raymond was determined to keep possession of Albert. Mrs. McComas,
+mother of three, stoutly declared that the mother should have her child.
+Other women said the same, and maintained the point regardless of the
+mother's course or conduct. Many women have said the same in many cases,
+and perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are completely right in the
+case of a boy of six, who surely needs a woman's care. But it is not
+difficult, even when material is more abundant than definite, to throw
+an atmosphere of dubiousness about a woman and to make it appear that
+she is not a "proper person...." So it appeared to the judge in this
+case, and so he ruled&mdash;with a shading, however. Albert might spend with
+his mother one month every summer&mdash;and some financial concession on
+Raymond's part helped make the time brief. However, she was to have
+nothing to say about Albert's mode of life through the rest of the year,
+and nothing (more specifically) about his education.</p>
+
+<p>"That makes him mine," said Raymond.</p>
+
+<p>And he set his lips firmly. He was one of<a class="pagenum" title="173" name="page_173" id="page_173"></a> those who set their lips
+firmly after the event is determined.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know whether Raymond had any real affection for Albert. I do
+not know whether he realized what it was for a father to undertake,
+single handed, the charge of a boy of six. I think that what moved him
+chiefly was his determination to carry a point. However all this may be,
+I remember what he said as, after the decree, he walked out with
+Albert's hand in his.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's over!"</p>
+
+<p>Over!&mdash;as if a separation involving a child is ever "over"!<a class="pagenum" title="174" name="page_174" id="page_174"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="PART_VI_3361" id="PART_VI_3361"></a>
+<h2>PART VI</h2>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="I_3367" id="I_3367"></a>
+<h2>I</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>His domestic difficulty left behind, Raymond settled down to a
+middle-aged life of dignity and leisure&mdash;or attempted to. But the trial
+had rather shaken the dignity, and the sole control of Albert ate into
+the leisure. There followed, naturally, a period of restlessness and
+discontent.</p>
+
+<p>Those who imputed no blame to Raymond still felt it unfortunate, even
+calamitous, that he should not have learned how to get on with a young
+wife. But there were those that did blame him&mdash;blamed him for an
+unbending, self-satisfied prig who would have driven almost any spirited
+young woman to desperation. These disparaged him; sometimes&mdash;not always
+covertly&mdash;they ridiculed him. That hurt not only his dignity, but his
+pride.</p>
+
+<p>Some of you have perhaps been looking for a generalized expression of
+general ideas&mdash;for some observations on marriage and divorce<a class="pagenum" title="175" name="page_175" id="page_175"></a> which
+should have the detachable and quotable quality of epigram. Yet suppose
+I were to observe, just here, that Marriage makes a promise to the ear
+and breaks it to the hope; or that Divorce is the martyr's crown after
+the tortures of Incompatibility; or that Marriage is the Inferno, the
+Divorce-Court the Purgatory, and Divorce itself the Paradiso of human
+life? You would not be likely to think the better of me, and I should
+certainly think less well of myself. Though I am conscious of a homespun
+quality of thought and diction, I must keep within the limits set me by
+nature, eschewing "brilliancy" and continuing to deal not in abstract
+considerations but in concrete facts.</p>
+
+<p>Little Albert spent a good part of his time in a condition of
+bewilderment; he perceived early that he must not ask questions, that he
+must not try to understand. At intervals he ran noisily through the big
+house and made it seem emptier than ever. A nurse, or governess, or
+attendant of some special qualifications was required&mdash;even for the
+short time before he should begin his month with his<a class="pagenum" title="176" name="page_176" id="page_176"></a> mother, who was
+spending some months with her parents in the East. Even the
+preliminaries for this small event occasioned considerable thought and
+provoked a reluctant correspondence. His mother&mdash;prompted probably by
+her own mother&mdash;wrote on the subject of Albert's summer clothes. She
+wished to buy most of them herself. The Eastern climate in summer had
+its special points; also local usage in children's costuming must be
+considered&mdash;in detailed appearance her child must conform measurably to
+that particular juvenile society in which he was to appear. Then there
+was the nurse, or governess. Should Albert be brought on by her? And
+should she, once in the East, remain there to take him back; or...?</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the devil!" cried Raymond, in his library, as he turned page after
+page of diffuse discourse. "How long is she going to run on? How many
+more things is she going to think of?"</p>
+
+<p>And she had felt impelled to address him, despite the cool tone of her
+letter, as "Dear<a class="pagenum" title="177" name="page_177" id="page_177"></a> Raymond." And that seemed to put him under the
+compulsion of addressing her, in turn, as "Dear Gertrude"! Truly, modes
+of address were scanty, inadequate.</p>
+
+<p>Well, Albert went East (wearing some of the disesteemed things he
+already possessed) to be outfitted for the summer shores of New Jersey.
+His governess took him as far as Philadelphia, where the Eastern
+connection met him, and "poored" him, sent the woman back home, and took
+him out on the shining sands. During the child's absence she made covers
+for the drawing-room sofas and chairs; the house, bereft of Albert and
+draped in pale Holland, became more dismal than ever.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond, now left alone, was free to devise a way of life in single
+harness. He liked it quite as well as the other way. He told himself,
+and he told me, that he liked it even better. I believe he did; and I
+believe he was relieved by the absence of Albert, whose little daily
+regimen, even when directed by competent assistance, had begun to grind
+into his father's consciousness. I even believe<a class="pagenum" title="178" name="page_178" id="page_178"></a> that the one serious
+drawback in Raymond's comfortable summer was the need of studying over a
+school for Albert in the fall.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond spent much of his time among his books. He had long since given
+up trying to "write anything"; less than ever was he in a mood to try
+that sort of exercise now. He looked over his shelves and resolved that
+he would make up a collection of books for the Art Museum. They were to
+be books on architecture, of which he had many. The Museum library, with
+hundreds of architectural students in and out, had few volumes in
+architecture, or none. He visioned a Raymond Prince alcove&mdash;those boys
+should be enabled to learn about the Byzantine buildings, just then
+coming into their own; and about the Renaissance in all its varieties,
+especially the Spanish Plateresque. He had a number of expensive and
+elaborate publications which dealt with that period, and with others,
+and he resolved to add new works from outside. He resumed his habit of
+going to book-auctions (though little developed at them), dickered with
+local dealers<a class="pagenum" title="179" name="page_179" id="page_179"></a> who limited themselves to a choice client&egrave;le, and sent to
+London for catalogues over which he studied endlessly. He would still
+play the r&ocirc;le of patron and benefactor. Perhaps he foresaw the time when
+the Museum would recognize donors of a certain importance by bronze
+memorial tablets set up in its entrance hall. Well, he would make his
+alcove important enough for any measure of recognition. It was all a
+work which interested him in its details and which was more in
+correspondence than a larger one with his present means.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="II_3465" id="II_3465"></a>
+<h2>II</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Before my wife and I left for an outing on the seaboard, news came from
+that quarter about Gertrude and Albert. Intelligence even reached us,
+through the same correspondent, regarding Mrs. Johnny McComas. Mrs.
+Johnny, with her three children, was frequenting the same sands and the
+same board walk. It was possible to imagine the arrangement as having
+been suggested by Raymond's one-time wife. See it for yourself.<a class="pagenum" title="180" name="page_180" id="page_180"></a> Mrs.
+Raymond and Mrs. Johnny slowly promenading back and forth together, or
+seated side by side beneath their respective parasols or under some gay
+awning shared in common, while their authentic children played about
+them. What if people&mdash;whether friends, acquaintances, or
+strangers&mdash;<i>did</i> say, "She is divorced"? There she was, with her own son
+plainly beside her and her closest woman friend giving her complete
+countenance. If a separation, who to blame? The husband, doubtless. In
+fact, there was already springing up in her Eastern circle, I was to
+find, the tradition of a dour, stiff man, years too old, with whom it
+was impossible to live.</p>
+
+<p>It is unlikely that Gertrude, at any time&mdash;even at this time&mdash;would have
+been willing to rank Mrs. Johnny as her closest friend. But Mrs. Johnny
+had spoken a good word for her in a trying season, and at the present
+juncture her friendly presence was invaluable. She could speak a good
+word now&mdash;she was, so to say, a continuing witness. The two, I presume,
+were seen together<a class="pagenum" title="181" name="page_181" id="page_181"></a> a good deal, along with the children, especially
+Albert; and Mrs. Johnny, co&ouml;perating (if unconsciously) with Gertrude's
+mother, did much to stabilize a somewhat uncertain situation.</p>
+
+<p>It was the understanding that Mrs. Johnny was in rather poor health this
+summer; the birth of her little daughter had left her a different woman,
+and the tonic of the sea-air was needed to remake her into her
+high-colored and energetic self. There was nothing especially reviving
+in the Wisconsin lakes, to which (placid inland ponds) they had confined
+their previous summer sojourns: and the vogue of the fresher resorts
+farther north on the greater lakes had not yet reached them. This year
+let the salt surf roll and the salt winds blow.</p>
+
+<p>My wife and I, in our Eastern peregrinations, passed a few days at the
+particular beach frequented by the two mothers. We really found in Mrs.
+Johnny's aspect and carriage some justification for the incredible
+legend of her poor health. She walked with less vigor than formerly and
+was glad to sit<a class="pagenum" title="182" name="page_182" id="page_182"></a> down more frequently; and once or twice we saw her
+taking the air at her bedroom window instead of on the broad walk before
+the shops. Her boys played robustly on the sands, and would play with
+Albert&mdash;or rather, let him play with them&mdash;if urged to. But, like most
+twins, they were self-sufficing; besides, they were several years older.
+To produce the full effect of team-work between the families required
+some perseverance and a bit of man&oelig;uvring. The little girl was hardly
+two.</p>
+
+<p>Gertrude and her mother welcomed us rather emphatically&mdash;too
+emphatically, we felt. The latter offered us politic lunches in the
+large dining-room of their hotel, and laid great stress upon our
+<i>provenance</i> when we met her friends on the promenade. We seemed to be
+becoming a part of a general plan of campaign&mdash;pawns on the board. This
+shortened our stay.</p>
+
+<p>The day before we left, Johnny McComas himself appeared. He had found a
+way to leave his widely ramifying interests for a few odd hours. A man
+of the right temperament<a class="pagenum" title="183" name="page_183" id="page_183"></a> gains greatly by a temporary estival
+transplantation; and if Johnny always contrived to seem dominant and
+prosperous at home, he now seemed lordly and triumphant abroad. He
+"dressed the part": he was almost as over-appropriately inappropriate as
+little Albert himself. He played ostentatiously with his boys on the
+sands, and did not mind Albert as one of their eye-drawing party. He,
+whether his wife did or no, responded fully and immediately to the salt
+waves and the salt winds.</p>
+
+<p>"Immense! isn't it?" he said to me, throwing out his chest to the breeze
+and teetering in his white shoes, out of sheer abundance of vitality, on
+the planks beneath him.</p>
+
+<p>There was only one drawback: his wife was really not well. And he
+wondered audibly to me, while my own wife was having a few words near by
+with Gertrude, how it was that a young woman could, within the first
+year of her married life, bear twins with no hurt or harm, and yet
+weaken, later, through the birth of a single child.<a class="pagenum" title="184" name="page_184" id="page_184"></a></p>
+
+<p>"She doesn't seem at all lively, that's a fact," he said, with a
+possible touch of impatience. "But another two weeks will do wonders for
+her," he added: "she'll go back all right."</p>
+
+<p>Prepotent Johnny! No doubt it was a drain on vitality to live abreast of
+such a man, to keep step with his robustious stride.</p>
+
+<p>On the forenoon of the day we left, Johnny was walking with Gertrude and
+her mother along the accepted promenade. His excess of vitality and of
+action gave him an air of gallantry not altogether pleasing to see. His
+wife sat at her window, looking down and waving her hand rather
+languidly. The Johnny of her belief had come, in part, assuredly, for a
+bit of enjoyment. She smiled unconcernedly.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="III_3561" id="III_3561"></a>
+<h2>III</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Raymond waited back home for Albert, and Albert did not return. We
+gathered from a newspaper published near the shores of Narragansett Bay
+that Albert, as his mother's triumphant possession, was now<a class="pagenum" title="185" name="page_185" id="page_185"></a> being shown
+at another resort&mdash;and a more important one, judging by his
+grandmother's social affiliations; also, that Mrs. McComas, who had not
+done any too well on the Jersey shore, was appearing at the new
+<i>plage</i>&mdash;doubtless as the just and sympathetic friend (of social
+prominence in her own community) who had stood stanch through
+difficulties unjustly endured. Her husband himself had, of course,
+returned to the West.</p>
+
+<p>His business called him, even in mid-summer. He had his bank, but he had
+more than his bank. There are banks and banks&mdash;you can divide them up in
+several different ways. There are, of course,&mdash;as we have seen,&mdash;the
+banks that fail, and the banks that do not. And there are the banks that
+exist as an end in themselves, and the banks that exist as a means to
+other things: those that function along methodically, without taking on
+any extraneous features; and those that serve as a nucleus for
+accumulating interests, as a fulcrum to move affairs through a wide and
+varied range. Of this<a class="pagenum" title="186" name="page_186" id="page_186"></a> kind was McComas's. Johnny was not the man to
+stand still and let routine take its way&mdash;not the man to mark time, even
+through the vacation season. Nor could he have done so even if he had
+wanted to. But all I need say, just here, is that he came back home
+again after three or four days, all told, and that any threatened
+embarassment was nullified, or at least postponed.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond heard in silence my account of the doings on the Atlantic shore:
+only a wry twist of the mouth and a flare of the nostrils. But as the
+weeks went on, and still no Albert, his anger became articulate.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall teach her that an agreement is an agreement," he declared. "She
+will never try this again."</p>
+
+<p>Albert finally came home, three weeks late; his mother brought him
+herself. The governess transferred him from the hands of one parent to
+those of the other; and Raymond had asked my presence for that moment,
+as a sort of moral urge.</p>
+
+<p>"Who knows," he asked, "what delay she may try for next?"<a class="pagenum" title="187" name="page_187" id="page_187"></a></p>
+
+<p>He gave one look at the picturesque, if not fantastic, toggery of his
+restored child.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you ever see anything like that?" he said scornfully; and I foresaw
+a sacrificial bonfire&mdash;or its equivalent&mdash;with Albert presently clothed
+in sane autumn garb.</p>
+
+<p>Albert was followed, within a week, by a letter from his mother. This
+was diffuse and circumlocutory, like the first. But its general sense
+was clear. If Raymond was thinking of putting Albert into a
+boarding-school....</p>
+
+<p>"There she goes again!" exclaimed the exacerbated father. "A matter with
+which, by hard-and-fast agreement, she has absolutely nothing to do!"</p>
+
+<p>However, if he was thinking of a boarding-school....</p>
+
+<p>"A child barely seven!" cried Raymond. "Why, half of them will hardly
+consider one of eight!"</p>
+
+<p>Still, if he was thinking&mdash;well, Mrs. McComas knew of a charming one, an
+old-established one, one in which the head-master's wife, a delightful,
+motherly soul.... And it<a class="pagenum" title="188" name="page_188" id="page_188"></a> was just within the Wisconsin line, not forty
+miles from town....</p>
+
+<p>"I see her camping at the gate!" said Raymond bitterly. "Or taking a
+house there. Or spending months at a hotel near by. Constantly fussing
+round the edge of things. Running in on every visitors' day...."</p>
+
+<p>"Likely enough," I said. "A mother's a mother."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," rejoined Raymond, "the boy <i>shall</i> go to school&mdash;in another
+year. But the school will be a good deal more than forty miles from
+here&mdash;no continual week-end trips. And it will not be in a town that has
+an endurable hotel&mdash;that ought to be easy to arrange, in this part of
+the world. No, it won't be near any town at all. I don't suppose she
+would take a&mdash;tent?" he queried sardonically.</p>
+
+<p>"To some mothers the blue tent of heaven would alone suffice," I
+said&mdash;perhaps unworthily.</p>
+
+<p>"Rubbish!" he ejaculated; and I felt that a word fitly spoken&mdash;or
+perhaps unfittingly&mdash;was rebuked.<a class="pagenum" title="189" name="page_189" id="page_189"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="IV_3651" id="IV_3651"></a>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>In due season, Albert went off to school, according to his father's
+plans; and it was not the school which Adele McComas had hoped to see
+Albert enter a little before her own boys should leave it. Raymond,
+after another year of daily attentions to Albert's small daily concerns,
+was glad to have him away. He did not see his boy's mother a frequent
+visitor at this school, nor did he purpose being a frequent visitor
+himself. The establishment was approved, well-recommended: let it do its
+work unaided, unhindered.</p>
+
+<p>No, Adele McComas never saw Albert at the school of her predilection;
+indeed, it was not long after the choice had been made that she lost all
+opportunity of seeing anything at all. She withered out, like a
+high-colored, hardy-seeming flower that belies all promise, and died
+when her little girl was months short of four.</p>
+
+<p>Her name was on the new monument within six weeks. It was the third
+title="190" name. That<a class="pagenum" name="page_190" id="page_190"></a> of Johnny's father had lately been placed above that of his
+mother, and that of his wife was now clearly legible upon the opposite
+side of the shaft's base. Some of Johnny's friends saw in this
+promptitude a high mark of respect and affection; others felt a haste,
+almost undue, to turn the new erection into a bulletin of "actualities";
+and a few surmised that had the work not been done with promptitude it
+might have come to be done in a leisurely fashion that spelled neglect:
+if it were to be done, 't were well it were done quickly&mdash;a formal token
+of regard checked off and disposed of.</p>
+
+<p>During Albert's first year at his school his mother made two or three
+appearances. She was exigent, and she showed herself to the school
+authorities as fertile in blandishments. The last of her visits was made
+in a high-powered touring-car. Raymond heard of this, and warned the
+school head against a possible attempt at abduction.</p>
+
+<p>The second year opened more quietly. One visit&mdash;a visit without
+eagerness and obviously lacking in any fell intent, and that was<a class="pagenum" title="191" name="page_191" id="page_191"></a> all.
+It was fair to surmise that this once-urgent, once-vehement mother had
+developed a newer and more compelling interest.</p>
+
+<p>She had made herself a figure at Adele McComas's funeral&mdash;or, at least,
+others had made her a figure at it. She began to be seen here and there
+in the company of the widower, and it was reported privately to me that
+she had been perceived standing side by side with him in decorous
+contemplation, as it were in a sort of transient, elegiac revery <i>&agrave;
+deux</i>, before the monument. It was no surprise, therefore, when we
+heard, two months later, that they had married.</p>
+
+<p>"That stable-boy!" said Raymond. "After&mdash;me!"</p>
+
+<p>The expression was strong, and I did not care to assent.</p>
+
+<p>Instead, I began:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"And now, whatever may or may not have been, everything is&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Everything is right, at last!" he concluded for me.</p>
+
+<p>"And if they&mdash;those two&mdash;are put in the right," he went on, "I suppose I
+am put in<a class="pagenum" title="192" name="page_192" id="page_192"></a> the wrong&mdash;and more in the wrong than ever!"</p>
+
+<p>He stared forward, across his littered table, beyond his bookcases,
+through his thick-lensed glasses, as if confronting the stiffening
+legend of a husband too old, too dry, too unpliable; the victim,
+finally, of a sudden turn that was peculiarly malapropos and
+disrelishing, the head of a household tricked rather ridiculously before
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>Reserve now began to grow on him. He simplified relationships and saw
+fewer people. Before these, and before the many at a greater remove, he
+would maintain a cautious dignity as a detached and individual human
+creature, as a man,&mdash;however much, in the world's eyes, he might have
+seemed to fail as a husband.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="V_3728" id="V_3728"></a>
+<h2>V</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>John W. McComas, at forty-five, was in apogee. His bank, as I have said,
+was coming to be more than a mere bank; it was now the focus of many
+miscellaneous enterprises. Several of these were industrial companies;
+prospectuses<a class="pagenum" title="193" name="page_193" id="page_193"></a> bearing his name and that of his institution constantly
+came my way. Some of these undertakings were novel and daring, but most
+of them went through; and he was more likely to use his associates than
+they were to use him. As I have said, he possessed but two interests in
+the world: his business&mdash;now his businesses&mdash;and his family; and he
+concentrated on both. It might be said that he insisted on the most
+which each would yield.</p>
+
+<p>He concentrated on his new domestic life with peculiar intensity. His
+boys were away at a preparatory school and were looking forward to
+college. He centred on his daughter, a future hope, and on his wife, a
+present reality and triumph. Over her, in particular, he bent like a
+flame, a bright flame that dazzled and did not yet sear. He was able, by
+this time, to coalesce with the general tradition in which she had been
+brought up&mdash;or at least with the newer tradition to which she had
+adjusted herself; and he was able to bring to bear a personal power the
+application of which she had never experienced. She found<a class="pagenum" title="194" name="page_194" id="page_194"></a> herself
+handled with decision. She almost liked it&mdash;at least it simplified some
+teasing problems. He employed a direct, bluff, hearty kindness; but
+strength underlay the kindness, and came first&mdash;came uppermost&mdash;if
+occasion seriously required. Life with Raymond had been a laxative, when
+not an irritant; life with Johnny McComas became a tonic. She had felt
+somewhat loose and demoralized; now she felt braced.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny was rich, and was getting richer yet. He was richer, much, than
+he had been but a few years before; richer than Raymond Prince, whose
+worldly fortunes seemed rather to dip. Johnny could give his wife
+whatever she fancied; when she hesitated, things were urged upon her,
+forced upon her. She, in her turn, was now a delegate of luxury. He
+approved&mdash;and insisted upon&mdash;a showy, emphatic way of life, and a more
+than liberal scale of expenditure. He wanted to show the world what he
+could do for a fine woman; and I believe he wanted to show Raymond
+Prince.</p>
+
+<p>Gossip had long since faded away to nothingness. If anybody had wondered
+at Johnny's<a class="pagenum" title="195" name="page_195" id="page_195"></a> course&mdash;a course that had run through possible dubiousness
+to hard-and-fast finality&mdash;the wonder was now inaudible. If anybody felt
+in him a lack of fastidiousness, the point was not pressed. The marriage
+seemed a happy solution, on the whole; and the people most
+concerned&mdash;those who met the new pair&mdash;appeared to feel that a problem
+was off the board and glad to have it so.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond, on the eve of the marriage, had softened things for himself by
+leaving for a few months in Rome. Back, he began to cast about for some
+means of occupation and some way of making a careful assertion of his
+dignity. At this time "society" was beginning to sail more noticeably
+about the edge of the arts, and an important coterie was feeling that
+something might well be done to lift the drama from its state of
+degradation. Why not build&mdash;or remodel&mdash;a theatre, they asked, form a
+stock company, compose a repertory, and see together a series of such
+performances as might be viewed without a total departure from taste and
+intelligence?<a class="pagenum" title="196" name="page_196" id="page_196"></a></p>
+
+<p>The experiment ran its own quaint course. The remodeling of the hall
+chosen introduced the sponsors of the movement to the fire-laws and
+resulted in a vast, unlooked-for expense. A good company&mdash;though less
+stress was laid on its roster than on the list of guarantors&mdash;went
+astray in the hands of a succession of directors, not always competent.
+The subscribers refused to occupy their boxes more than one night a
+week, and, later on, not even that: the space was filled for a while
+with servitors and domestic dependents, and presently by nobody....</p>
+
+<p>Raymond went into the enterprise. He put in a goodly sum of money that
+never came back to him; and if he co&ouml;perated but indifferently, or
+worse, he was not more inept than some of his associates. He was
+displeased to learn that the McComases had given enough to the
+guarantee-fund to insure them a box. And it offended him that, on the
+opening night, his former wife, one of a large and assertive party,
+should make her voice heard during intermissions (and at some other
+times too) quite across the small auditorium. The<a class="pagenum" title="197" name="page_197" id="page_197"></a> situation was
+generally felt to be piquant, and at the end of the performance people
+in the lobby were amused (save the few who had the affair greatly at
+heart) to hear Johnny McComas's comment on the play. It was a
+far-fetched problem-play from the German, and Raymond had been one of
+those who favored it for an opening.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you ever see such a play in your life?" queried Johnny. "What was
+it all about? And wasn't <i>he</i> the fool!"</p>
+
+<p>McComas&mdash;really caring nothing for the evening's entertainment either
+way&mdash;could easily afford a large amount for social prestige, and his
+wife for general social consolidation. It was little to Johnny that his
+thousands went up in exacting systems of ventilation and in salaries for
+an expensive staff; but it was awkward for Raymond to lose a sum which,
+while absolutely less, was relatively much greater. After a few months
+the scheme was dropped; the expensive installation went to the advantage
+of a vaudeville manager; Raymond felt poorer, even slightly crippled,
+and the voice of the present Mrs. Johnny<a class="pagenum" title="198" name="page_198" id="page_198"></a> McComas ran till the end
+across that tiny <i>salle</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This, I am glad to say, was the last of Raymond's endeavors to patronize
+the arts.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="VI_3830" id="VI_3830"></a>
+<h2>VI</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Albert's last year at his distant school ended rather abruptly. He came
+home, ailing, about a month before the close of the school year. He was
+thin and languid. He may have been growing too fast; he may have been
+studying too hard; he may have missed the "delightful motherly soul" who
+would have brooded over him at the school first proposed; or the
+drinking-water may have been infected&mdash;<i>que sais-je</i>? Well, Albert moped
+during much of May through the big house, and his mother heard of his
+return and his moping, made the most of it, and insisted on a
+visitation.</p>
+
+<p>The child-element, of late, had not been large in her life. Her two tall
+stepsons were flourishing in absence; she had had no second child of her
+own; little Althea was nice enough, and she liked her pretty well....<a class="pagenum" title="199" name="page_199" id="page_199"></a>
+But there was her own flesh and blood crying for her&mdash;perhaps. So she
+descended on the old, familiar interior&mdash;familiar and distasteful&mdash;and
+resumed with zeal the r&ocirc;le of mother.</p>
+
+<p>Her presence was awkward, anomalous. The servants were disconcerted, and
+scarcely knew how to take her fluttery yet imperious orders. For Raymond
+himself, as any one could see, it was all purgatory&mdash;or worse. Every
+room had its peculiar and disagreeable memories. There was the
+chamber-threshold over which they had discussed her tendency to out-mode
+the mode and to push every extreme of fashion to an extreme still more
+daring&mdash;for that black gown with spangles, or whatever, had been but the
+first of a long, flagrant line. There was the particular spot in the
+front hall, before that monumental, old-fashioned, black-walnut
+"hat-rack," where he had cautioned more care in her attitude toward
+young bachelors, if only in consideration of his own dignity, his
+"face." There was the dining-room&mdash;yes, she stayed to meals, of course,
+and to many of them!&mdash;where<a class="pagenum" title="200" name="page_200" id="page_200"></a> (in the temporary absence of service) he
+had criticized more than once the details of her housekeeping and of her
+menu&mdash;had told her just how he "wanted things" and how he meant to have
+them. And in each case she had pouted, or scoffed, and had contrived
+somehow to circumvent him, to thwart him, and to get with well-cloaked,
+or with uncloaked, insistence her own way. Heavenly recollections! He
+felt, too, from her various glances and shrugs, that the house was more
+of a horror to her than ever, and, above all, that abominable
+orchestrion more hugely preposterous.</p>
+
+<p>Albert kept mostly to his room. It was the same room which Raymond
+himself had occupied as a boy. It had the same view of that window above
+the stable at which Johnny McComas had sorted his insects and arranged
+his stamps. The stable was now, of course, a garage; but the time was on
+the way when both car and chauffeur would be dispensed with. Parallel
+wires still stretched between house and garage, as an evidence of
+Raymond's endeavor to fill in the remnant of<a class="pagenum" title="201" name="page_201" id="page_201"></a> Albert's previous vacation
+with some entertaining novelty that might help wipe out his recollection
+of the month lately spent with his mother. Albert was modern enough to
+prefer wireless&mdash;just then coming in&mdash;to "bugs" and postage-stamps; but
+the time remaining had been short. Besides, Albert liked the theatre
+better; and Raymond, during those last weeks in August, had sat through
+many woeful and stifling performances of vaudeville that he might regain
+and keep his hold on his son. His presence at these functions was
+observed and was commented upon by several persons who were aware of the
+aid he was giving for a bettered stage.</p>
+
+<p>"Fate's irony!" he himself would sometimes say inwardly, with a sidelong
+glance at Albert, preoccupied with knockabouts or trained dogs.</p>
+
+<p>Albert spent some of his daylight hours in bed; some in moving about the
+room spiritlessly. He looked out with lack-lustre eyes at the sagging
+wires, and seemed to be wondering how they could ever have interested
+him. His mother, as soon as she saw him, put<a class="pagenum" title="202" name="page_202" id="page_202"></a> him at death's door&mdash;at
+least she saw him headed straight for that dark portal. She began to
+insist, after a few days, that he go home with her: he would be hers, by
+right, within a fortnight, anyhow. Her new house, she declared, would be
+an immensely better place for him, and would immensely help him to get
+well, if&mdash;with a half-sob&mdash;he ever <i>was</i> to get well.</p>
+
+<p>She knew, of course, the early legend of Johnny McComas, and had no wish
+to linger in its locale.</p>
+
+<p>"You <i>do</i> want to go with your own, own mother&mdash;don't you, dear?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," replied Albert faintly.</p>
+
+<p>The town-house of Johnny McComas, bought at an open-eyed bargain and on
+a purely commercial basis, had some time since fulfilled its predestined
+function. It had been taken over, at a very good price, by an automobile
+company; the purchasers had begun to tear it down before the last load
+of furniture was fairly out, and had quickly run up a big block in
+russet brick and plate glass. Gertrude McComas had had no desire to<a class="pagenum" title="203" name="page_203" id="page_203"></a>
+inherit memories of her predecessor; if she had not urged the promptest
+action her husband's plan might have given him a still more gratifying
+profit.</p>
+
+<p>They had built their new house out on the North Shore. At one time the
+society of that quarter had seemed, however desirable to the McComases,
+somewhat inaccessible. But the second wife was more likely to help
+Johnny thitherward than the first. Besides, the participation of the new
+pair in the scheme of dramatic uplift&mdash;however slight, essentially&mdash;had
+made the promised land nearer and brighter. They might now transplant
+themselves to that desired field with a certainty of some few social
+relations secured in advance.</p>
+
+<p>They had a long-reaching, rough-cast house, in a semi-Spanish style,
+high above the water. They had ten acres of lawn and thicket. They had
+their own cow. And there was little Althea&mdash;a nice enough child&mdash;for a
+playmate.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me get Albert away from all this smoke and grime," his mother
+pleaded&mdash;or<a class="pagenum" title="204" name="page_204" id="page_204"></a> argued&mdash;or demanded, dramatically. "Let me give him the
+pure country air. Let me give him the right things to eat and drink. Let
+me look after his poor little clothes,&mdash;if" (with another half-sob) "he
+is ever to wear them again. Let me give him a real mother's real care.
+You <i>would</i> like that better, wouldn't you, dear?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Albert faintly.</p>
+
+<p>It is quite possible, of course, that his school really had scanted the
+motherly touch.</p>
+
+<p>"You see how it goes!" Raymond finally said to me, one evening, in the
+shadow of the orchestrion. "And what she will dress him in <i>this</i>
+time...!"</p>
+
+<p>The whole situation wore on him horribly. There was a light play over
+his cheeks and jaws: I almost heard his teeth grit.</p>
+
+<p>A few days later Albert was transferred to his mother's place in the
+country. Raymond consoled himself as best he might with the thought that
+this sojourn was, after all, but preliminary, as Gertrude had herself
+implied, to the coming month on the Maine coast or at Mackinac. A change
+of air, a greater<a class="pagenum" title="205" name="page_205" id="page_205"></a> change of air, a change to an air immensely and
+unmistakably and immediately tonic and upbuilding&mdash;that, as his mother
+stated, with emphasis, was what Albert required.</p>
+
+<p>So Albert, by way of introduction to his real summer, came to be
+domiciled under the splendid new roof of Johnny McComas&mdash;a roof, to
+Raymond's exacerbated sense, gleaming but heavy. Its tiles&mdash;he had not
+seen them, but he readily visualized them&mdash;bore him down. He was not
+obliged, as yet, to meet McComas himself. That came later.<a class="pagenum" title="206" name="page_206" id="page_206"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="PART_VII_3970" id="PART_VII_3970"></a>
+<h2>PART VII</h2>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="I_3976" id="I_3976"></a>
+<h2>I</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Albert recovered in due season&mdash;a little more rapidly, it may be, than
+if he had stayed with his father, but not more completely. His education
+progressed, entering another phase, and still with the unauthorized
+co&ouml;peration of his mother. During his stay with her she had really
+wrought no great havoc in his wardrobe, whatever she may have
+accomplished on a previous occasion. In fact, Albert had reached the
+point where he dressed in a manlier fashion&mdash;a fashion fortunately
+standardized beyond a mother's whims. In his turn, as it had been with
+his brothers by marriage, it was now the real preparatory school, with
+college looming ahead.</p>
+
+<p>By this time Raymond had completely made his belated adieux to &aelig;sthetic
+concerns and had begun to concentrate on practical matters&mdash;on his own.
+They needed his<a class="pagenum" title="207" name="page_207" id="page_207"></a> attention, even if he had not the right quality of
+attention to give. I had my doubts, and they did not grow less as time
+went on. Raymond was now within hail of fifty, and he added to his long
+list of earlier mistakes a new mistake peculiar to his years and to his
+training&mdash;or his lack of it.</p>
+
+<p>Briefly, he assumed that age in itself brought knowledge, and that young
+men in their twenties&mdash;even their late twenties&mdash;were but boys. The
+disadvantage of holding this view became apparent when he began to do
+business with them. He depended too much on his own vague fund of
+experience, and did not realize how dangerous it might be to encounter
+keen specialists&mdash;however young&mdash;in their own field. He was now engaged
+in a general recasting of his affairs, and they came to him in
+numbers&mdash;bright, boyish, young fellows, he called them. He tended to
+patronize them, and he began to deal with them rather informally and
+much too confidently.</p>
+
+<p>The family bank, after languishing along for a liberal time under its
+receiver, had been<a class="pagenum" title="208" name="page_208" id="page_208"></a> wound up, and the stockholders, among whom he was a
+large one but far from the largest, accepted the results and turned wry
+faces to new prospects elsewhere. The family holdings of real-estate, on
+the edge of the central district rather than in it, did not share the
+general and almost automatic advance in values, and an uncertain,
+slow-moving scheme for a general public improvement&mdash;one that
+continually promised to eventuate yet continually held off&mdash;had kept one
+of his warehouses vacant for years: its only income was contributed by
+an advertising company, which utilized part of its front as a
+bulletin-board. Rents in this quarter kept down, though taxes&mdash;more
+through rising rates than increased valuations&mdash;went up. And those two
+big old houses! Raymond still lived, too expensively in one, and paid
+interest on a cumbering old mortgage. The other&mdash;old Jehiel's&mdash;was
+rented, at no great advantage, to a kind of correspondence school which
+conducted dubious courses and was precarious pay.</p>
+
+<p>In such circumstances Raymond began to<a class="pagenum" title="209" name="page_209" id="page_209"></a> lend an ear to offers of
+"real-estate trades" and to suggestions for reinvestments. But
+real-estate, in which almost everybody had once dabbled (with advantage
+assumed and usually realized), had now become a game for experts.
+Profits for the few: disaster&mdash;or at least disillusionment&mdash;for the
+many. Raymond thought he could "exchange" to advantage, and the bright
+young men (who knew what they were about much better than he did)
+flocked to help him. Well, one man in a hundred exchanges with profit;
+the ninety-and-nine, the further they go the more they lose&mdash;onions
+peeled coat by coat. Thus Raymond, until I heard of some of his
+operations and tried to stop them. One frank-faced, impudent young chap,
+who thought he was secure in a contract, I had to frighten off; but
+others had preceded him.</p>
+
+<p>Investments were offered him too: schemes in town, and schemes&mdash;bolder
+and more numerous&mdash;out of town. Some of these had the support of McComas
+and his "crowd," and turned out advantageously enough, for those on the
+"inside"&mdash;to<a class="pagenum" title="210" name="page_210" id="page_210"></a> continue the jargon of the day and its interests; but
+Raymond sensitively, even fastidiously, stepped away from these, and
+trusted himself, rather, to financial free lances who often were not
+only without principle, but also without definite foothold.</p>
+
+<p>"If you would only consult me!" more than once I had occasion to
+remonstrate. "Who are these people? What organization have they
+got&mdash;what responsibility?"</p>
+
+<p>But though he would dicker with strangers, who took hours of his time
+with their specious palaverings, he shrank more and more from his own
+tenants and his own agents. One rather important lease had to be renewed
+over his head&mdash;or behind his back. Still, I do not know that, on this
+particular occasion, his interests greatly suffered.</p>
+
+<p>Thus Raymond began to approach a permanent impairment of his affairs at
+an age when recuperation for a man of his deficiencies was as good as
+out of the question. Further on still he began to suspect&mdash;even to
+realize&mdash;that he was unfitted to cope with adults. In his later fifties
+he began to<a class="pagenum" title="211" name="page_211" id="page_211"></a> pat children on their heads in parks and to rub the noses
+of horses in the streets. With the younger creatures of the human race
+and with the gentler orders of the brute creation he felt he could trust
+himself, and still escape disaster. If he found little girls sticking
+rows of fallen catalpa-blossoms on the spikes of iron fences, he would
+stop and praise their powers of design. He became susceptible to tiny
+boys in brown sweaters or infinitesimal blue overalls, and he seldom
+passed without a touch of sympathy the mild creatures that helped
+deliver the laundry-bundles or the milk. Especially if they were white:
+he was always sorry, he said, for white coats in a dirty town.</p>
+
+<p>But such matters of advancing age are for the future.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="II_4078" id="II_4078"></a>
+<h2>II</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>As regards the affairs of McComas, I naturally had a lesser knowledge.
+They were more numerous and more complicated; nor was I close to them. I
+can only say that they went on prosperously, and continued to go<a class="pagenum" title="212" name="page_212" id="page_212"></a> on
+prosperously: their success justified his concentration on them.</p>
+
+<p>As regards his home and his domestic affairs, I can have more to say. My
+wife and I called once or twice at their new house; with a daughter of
+twenty-odd, there was no reason why we should not cultivate that
+particular suburb, and every reason why we should.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny's two sons were at home, briefly, as seniors who were soon to
+graduate. They were tall, hearty lads, with some of their father's high
+coloring. One of them was to be injured on the ball-field in his last
+term, and to die at home a month later. The other, recovering some of
+the individuality which a twin sometimes finds it none too easy to
+assert, was to marry before he had been out of college six weeks&mdash;marry
+young, like his father before him. The girl, young Althea, rather
+resembling her mother,&mdash;her own mother,&mdash;was beginning to think less of
+large hair-bows and more of longer dresses. Her father was quite wrapped
+up in her and her stepmother seemed to take to her kindly.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny, in conducting us over his house,<a class="pagenum" title="213" name="page_213" id="page_213"></a> laid great stress on her room.
+On her suite, rather; or even on her wing. She had her own study, her
+own bath, her own sleeping porch and sun-parlor. Everything had been
+very delicately and richly done. And she had her own runabout in the
+garage.</p>
+
+<p>"The boys will go, of course," Johnny said to us, with his arm about his
+daughter; "but our little Althea will be a good girl and not leave her
+poor old father."</p>
+
+<p>Ah, yes, girls sometimes have a way of lingering at home. Our own Elsie
+has always remained faithful to her parents.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny had chosen to call himself "old" and "poor." Of course he looked
+neither. True, his chestnut hair was beginning to gray; but it made,
+unless clipped closer than he always wore it, at least an intimation of
+a florid aureole of crisp vigor; and his whole person gave an exudation
+of power and prosperity. No sorrow had come to him beyond the death of
+his parents&mdash;an inevitable loss which he had duly recorded in public.
+That record had yet to receive another title="214" name&mdash;and yet another.<a class="pagenum" name="page_214" id="page_214"></a></p>
+
+<p>His wife, who had seemed to begin by bracing herself to stand against
+him, now seemed to have braced herself to stand with him&mdash;perhaps a more
+commendable wifely attitude. I mean that the discipline incident to a
+life of success which was not without its rigors had become to her
+almost a second nature. The order of the day was co&ouml;peration, team-work;
+in the grand advance she was no straggler, no malingerer. It was a
+matter of pride to keep step with him; she was now beyond the fear which
+possibly for the first few years had troubled her&mdash;the fear that he, by
+word, or look, or even by silence, might hint to her that she was not
+fully "keeping up." Johnny himself was now rather heavy; for the regimen
+which they were pursuing he had the strength that insured against any
+loss of flesh through tax on the nerves. His wife, for her part, looked
+rather lean&mdash;trained, even trained down. As the wife of Raymond, she
+would probably have lapsed by now into pinguitude and sloth&mdash;unless
+discontent and exasperation had prevented.</p>
+
+<p>After showing us the private grandeurs of<a class="pagenum" title="215" name="page_215" id="page_215"></a> their own estate, they
+motored us to the co&ouml;rdinated splendors of their club. It had been a
+good club&mdash;one of the best of its kind&mdash;from the start, and now it had
+grown bigger and better. Its arcaded porches and its verandas were wide;
+its links showed the hand of the expert, yet also the sensitive touch of
+the landscape gardener; an orchestra of greater size and merit than is
+common in such heedless gatherings played for itself if not for the
+gossiping, stirring throng; and people talked golf-jargon (for which I
+don't care) and polo (of which I know even less). Though the day was one
+in the relatively early spring, things were "going"; temporary backsets
+would doubtless ensue&mdash;meanwhile get the good out of a clear, fair
+afternoon, if but a single one.</p>
+
+<p>Through all this gay stir the McComases contrived to make themselves
+duly felt. Johnny himself was one of the governors, I gathered; as such
+he took part in a small, hurried confab in the smoking-room. Whether or
+not there was a point in dispute, I do not know; but when he rose and
+led me<a class="pagenum" title="216" name="page_216" id="page_216"></a> forth with his curved palm under my elbow the matter had been
+settled his way, and no ill-feeling left: rather, as I sensed it, a
+feeling of relief that some one had promptly and energetically laid a
+moot question for once and all.</p>
+
+<p>His two tall boys I saw walking, with an amiable air of an habituated
+understanding, around a billiard-table: "Can you beat them?" asked
+Johnny proudly, as we passed the open window. His daughter circulated
+confidently, as being almost a member in full and regular standing
+herself. She seemed to know intimately any number of girls of her own
+age, and even a few lads of seventeen or so&mdash;an advantage which our
+Elsie, at that stage, never quite enjoyed, and which, due allowance made
+for altered conditions, she was somewhat slow in gaining, later.</p>
+
+<p>And about his wife? Well, the slate appeared to have been wiped&mdash;if
+there really had been any definite marks upon it. Assuredly no smears
+were left to show. Those of the younger generation of seven or eight
+years before had used the time and arranged their<a class="pagenum" title="217" name="page_217" id="page_217"></a> futures, and the
+still younger were pressing into their places&mdash;witness Johnny's own
+brood. Gertrude McComas was now a self-assured though careful
+matron&mdash;careful, I thought, not to ask too much of general society;
+careful not to notice whether or no she received too little; careful,
+most of all, not to let it appear that she <i>was</i> careful. Perhaps it was
+this care which made up a part of her general strain&mdash;and enabled her to
+keep the lithe slenderness of her early figure.</p>
+
+<p>We came back to town&mdash;the three of us&mdash;by train. Both of my Elsies were
+thoughtful. Certainly we were playing a less brilliant part than the
+family we had just left.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="III_4189" id="III_4189"></a>
+<h2>III</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Meanwhile Albert pursued his studies. Though he had not so far to come
+for a short vacation as the McComas young men, he spent the short
+vacations at the school. He was at an awkward age, and Raymond, who
+could see him with eyes not unduly clouded by affection, felt him to be
+an unpromising cub.<a class="pagenum" title="218" name="page_218" id="page_218"></a> He was no adornment for any house, and no
+satisfying companion for his father. So he passed the Easter week among
+his teachers.</p>
+
+<p>McComas too saw little of Albert. Those months with his mother were
+usually worked off at some distant resort, which his stepfather was
+often too busy to reach. Only once did he spend any of the allotted time
+in McComas's house. This was a fortnight in that grandiose yet tawdry
+fabric which had been sacrificed to business, and the occasion was an
+illness in the family (not Albert's) which delayed the summer's outing.
+McComas had accepted Albert with a large tolerance&mdash;at least he was not
+annoyed. In fact, the boy's mother, however she may have harassed
+Raymond, never (to do her justice) pushed Albert on her second husband.
+So, when the juncture arrived,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes," Johnny had said, "have him here, of course; and let him stay
+as long as you like. He doesn't bother <i>me</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Well, Albert went ahead, doing his Latin, and groping farther into the
+dusky penumbra of mathematics. "Why?" he asked; and<a class="pagenum" title="219" name="page_219" id="page_219"></a> they explained that
+it was the necessary preparation for the university. Albert pondered. He
+began to fear that he must continue learning things he didn't want or
+need, so that he might go ahead toward learning other things he didn't
+want or need. He took a plaintive, discouraged tone in a letter to his
+mother; and she&mdash;making an exception to her rule&mdash;passed along the
+protest to McComas. She felt, I suppose, that he would give an answering
+note.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny laughed. He himself cared nothing for study; and he was so
+happily constituted, as well as so constantly occupied, that he never
+had to take refuge in a book.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well," he said, broadly, "he'll live through it all, and live it
+down. I expect Tom and Joe to. The final gains will be in quite another
+direction."</p>
+
+<p>Raymond had heard the same plaint from Albert, and was less pleased. The
+boy was clearly to be no student, still less a lover of the arts.
+Raymond passed over all thought of old Jehiel, the ruthlessly
+acquisitive, and placed the blame on the other grandfather,<a class="pagenum" title="220" name="page_220" id="page_220"></a> who was now
+in an early dotage after a lifelong harnessing to the stock-ticker.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> don't know how he's coming out!" was Raymond's impatient remark,
+over one of Albert's letters. "Who knows what <i>any</i> boy is going to be?"</p>
+
+<p>Albert accepted his school readily enough as a place of residence. He
+did not now need, so much as before, his mother's small cares&mdash;in fact,
+was glad to be relieved from them; nor was he quite advanced enough to
+profit from a cautious father's hints and suggestions. I found myself
+hoping that Raymond, at the coming stage of Albert's development, might
+have as little trouble as I had had over my own boy (with whose early
+career I shall not burden you). Yet, after all, fathers may
+apprehensively exchange views and cautiously devise methods of approach
+only to find their efforts superfluous: so many boys come through
+perfectly well, after all. Simply consider, for example, those in our
+old singing-class. The only one to occasion any inconvenience was Johnny
+McComas, and he was not a member at all.<a class="pagenum" title="221" name="page_221" id="page_221"></a></p>
+
+<p>The one side of the matter that began to concern Raymond was the money
+side. Albert cost at school, and was going to cost more at college. His
+father began to economize. For instance, he cut off, this spring, the
+contribution which he had been making for years in support of an
+organization of reformers that had been working for civic betterment.
+These men, considering their small number and their limited resources
+had done wonders in raising the tone and quality of the local
+administration. The city's reputation, outside, had become respectable.
+But a sag had begun to show itself&mdash;the relapse that is pretty certain
+to follow on an extreme and perhaps overstrained endeavor. The little
+band needed money. Raymond was urged to reconsider and to continue&mdash;the
+upgrade would soon be reached again. Raymond sent, reluctantly, a
+smaller amount and asked why the net for contributions was not cast a
+little wider. He even suggested a few names.</p>
+
+<p>Whether he mentioned the title="222" name of John<a class="pagenum" name="page_222" id="page_222"></a> W. McComas I do not know, but
+McComas was given an opportunity to help.</p>
+
+<p>"See what they've sent me," he said to me one day on the street.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled over the urgent, fervid phrases of the appeal. The world, so
+far as he was concerned, was going very well. It didn't need
+improvement; and if it did, he hadn't the time to improve it.</p>
+
+<p>"They appear to be losing their grip," he added. "They didn't do very
+well last election, anyhow."</p>
+
+<p>I sensed his reluctance to be associated with a cause that seemed to be
+a losing one.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know," I said. "I'm giving something myself; and if I can
+afford to, you can."</p>
+
+<p>But he developed no interest. He sent a check absurdly disproportionate
+to his capacity (he was embarrassed, I am glad to say, when he mentioned
+later the amount); and I incline to think that even this bit was done
+almost out of a personal regard for me.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond cut a part of his own contribution out of Albert's allowance,
+and there was<a class="pagenum" title="223" name="page_223" id="page_223"></a> better reason than ever why Albert should not take a long
+trip for only four or five days at home.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="IV_4299" id="IV_4299"></a>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is tiresome, I know, to read about municipal reform; most of us want
+the results and not the process&mdash;and some of us not even the results.
+And it is no less tiresome to read about investments, unless we are
+dealing with some young knight of finance who strives successfully for
+his lady's favor and who, successful, lives with her ever after in the
+style to which her father has accustomed her. But in the case of a
+maladroit man of fifty....</p>
+
+<p>I had asked Raymond to call on me with any new scheme that was taking
+his attention, and one forenoon he walked in.</p>
+
+<p>He had an envelope of loose papers. He laid some of them on my desk and
+thumbed a few others with an undecided expression.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think of this?" he asked. "I've got to have more money, and
+here's something that may bring it in."<a class="pagenum" title="224" name="page_224" id="page_224"></a></p>
+
+<p>It was a speculative industrial affair in Upper Michigan. I saw some
+familiar names attached&mdash;among them that of John W. McComas, though not
+prominently.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll find out for you," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want you to find out from him."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll find out."</p>
+
+<p>Raymond fingered his envelope fussily: there was nothing left in it.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all costing me too much. Extras at that school. That big
+house&mdash;too big, too expensive. I can't lug it along any farther. Find me
+some one to buy it."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll see," I said.</p>
+
+<p>I told him about our visit to the club, two or three months before. I
+implied, in as delicate and circumambulatory a way as possible, that his
+one-time wife, according to my own observations, taken under peculiarly
+favorable, because exacting, conditions, was completely accepted.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes," he replied, as if the matter had been settled years ago, and
+as if he had long had that sense of it. Yes, he seemed to be saying, the
+marriage had made it all right<a class="pagenum" title="225" name="page_225" id="page_225"></a> for her, and had soon begun to make it
+better for him. Possibly not a "deceived" husband; and no longer so
+rawly flagrant a failure as a human companion.</p>
+
+<p>"Their house is good, I gather," he went on. "There were some plates of
+it in the architectural journals. Just how good he doesn't know, I
+suppose&mdash;and never will."</p>
+
+<p>"I found him fairly appreciative of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Possibly&mdash;as a financial achievement brought about by his own money."</p>
+
+<p>"He's learning some of its good points," I declared.</p>
+
+<p>"There was some talk of having Albert there, just before they went off
+to the Yellowstone." He frowned. "Well, this can't go on so many more
+years, now."</p>
+
+<p>I did not quite get Raymond's attitude. He did not want the boy with him
+at home. He did not want to meet any extra expenses&mdash;and Mrs. McComas
+was assuredly paying Albert's way through mid-summer, as well as
+eternally buying him clothes. I think that what Raymond wanted&mdash;and
+wanted but rather weakly&mdash;was his own will, whether<a class="pagenum" title="226" name="page_226" id="page_226"></a> there was any
+advantage in it or not, and wanted that will without payments, charges,
+costs.</p>
+
+<p>I disliked his grudging way, or rather, his balking way, as regarded a
+recognition of the liberality of his former wife's husband&mdash;for that was
+what it came to.</p>
+
+<p>I returned his prospectus. "I'll look this up. How about that company in
+Montana?" I continued.</p>
+
+<p>"They've passed a dividend. I was counting on something from that
+quarter."</p>
+
+<p>"And how about the factory in Iowa?"</p>
+
+<p>"That will bring me something next year."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," I said, doubling back to the matter that had brought him in,
+"I'll inquire about this and let you know."</p>
+
+<p>In the course of a few days I called on McComas. Others were calling.
+Others were always calling. If I wanted to see him I should have to
+wait. I had expected to wait. I waited.</p>
+
+<p>When I was finally admitted, he rose and came halfway through his
+splendors of upholstery to give me an Olympian greeting.<a class="pagenum" title="227" name="page_227" id="page_227"></a></p>
+
+<p>"It's brass tacks," I said. "Three minutes will do."</p>
+
+<p>"Four, if you like."</p>
+
+<p>"Three. Frankly, very frankly, is this a thing"&mdash;here I used the large
+page of ornamental letter-press as word-saver&mdash;"is this a thing for an
+ordinary investor?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ordinary investor"&mdash;that is what I called Raymond. Perhaps I flattered
+him unduly.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," responded McComas, with a grimace, "it's a right enough thing for
+the right man&mdash;or men. Several of us expect to do pretty well out of
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"'Several'? How about the rank outsider?"</p>
+
+<p>"Anybody that <i>you</i> know sniffing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Who?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;Prince."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm." Johnny pondered; became magnanimous. "Well, it ain't for him.
+Pull his nose away. I don't want his money."</p>
+
+<p>He knew what he had taken. He may have had a prescience of what he was
+yet to take. He could afford an interim of generosity.<a class="pagenum" title="228" name="page_228" id="page_228"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="V_4429" id="V_4429"></a>
+<h2>V</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>A year or so went on, and we met the McComases at a horse-show. Once
+more it had become distinguished to have horses, and to exhibit them&mdash;in
+the right place. Althea was with her parents; so was the survivor of the
+stalwart twins.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny had taken the blow hard. That a son of his, one so strong and
+robust, a youth on whom so much time and thought and care and money had
+been lavished to fit him for the world, should go down and go out (and
+in such a sudden, trivial fashion)&mdash;oh, it was more than he felt he
+could endure. But he was built on a broad plan; his nature, when the
+test came, opened a wide door to the assimilation of experiences and
+offered a wide margin for adjustment to their jars. His other son, the
+full equal of the lost one, still survived and was present to-day; and
+Johnny, grandly reconciled, was himself again.</p>
+
+<p>Althea had taken the interval to make sure about her hair-ribbon and her
+skirts. The ribbons had been pronounced outgrown and<a class="pagenum" title="229" name="page_229" id="page_229"></a> superfluous, and
+had been banished. The suitability of longer skirts had been felt, and
+had been acted upon. Althea was now almost a young lady, and a very
+pretty one.</p>
+
+<p>I say it without bitterness. The beauties of nature&mdash;those trifles that
+make the great differences&mdash;are indeed unequally distributed among human
+creatures. Not all girls are pretty; not all attractive; not all
+equipped to make their way. No.</p>
+
+<p>You will assume for yourselves the greenery of grass and trees, the slow
+cumuli in the afternoon sky, the lively, brightly dressed throngs on
+lawns and verandas, and the horses; yes, even those were present,
+somewhere or other.</p>
+
+<p>Gertrude McComas was of the crowd; suitably dressed (or, perhaps,
+attired), a little less spare than once, and somehow conveying the
+impression, if unobtrusively, that her presence was necessary for the
+completeness of the function. She was pleasant with Althea, who had a
+horse on her mind and a number on her back.</p>
+
+<p>Gertrude had returned from the North<a class="pagenum" title="230" name="page_230" id="page_230"></a> with Althea and Albert, a week
+before Albert's allotted time with her was up, so that they might all be
+a part of this occasion. Albert was now taller than his father, had
+begun to gather up a little assertiveness on reaching the end of his
+preparatory days, had taken his examinations, and was understood to be
+within a month or so of college.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot say that Althea's skirts, however much thought she had given
+them, were long to-day. The only skirts she wore were the skirts of her
+riding-coat. The rest of her was boots and trousers; and she carried a
+little quirt with which she flecked the dust from her nethers, now and
+again, rather smartly.</p>
+
+<p>Albert looked&mdash;obviously envious, and obviously perturbed. His various
+knockings from pillar to post had left him without horse and without
+horsemanship. And here was a young feminine (almost a relative, in a
+sense; well, was she, or was she not?) who was dressed as he (with some
+slight differences) might have been dressed, and who was doing<a class="pagenum" title="231" name="page_231" id="page_231"></a> (or was
+about to do) some of the things that he himself (as he was now keenly
+conscious) had always hankered to do.... How was he to take it all?&mdash;the
+difference, the likeness, the closeness, the distance....</p>
+
+<p>And we&mdash;my wife and I&mdash;became suddenly, poignantly, even bitterly aware
+that our Elsie, beside us in her tailor-made, had never been on a horse
+in her life&mdash;and was now perhaps too old to make a good beginning.</p>
+
+<p>After a little while Althea was carried away for her "entry" or "event,"
+or whatever they properly call it&mdash;for I am no sportsman. Some small
+section of the crowd interested itself about the same time&mdash;at least got
+between us and the proceedings. We saw little or nothing&mdash;just heads,
+hats and parasols. All I know is that, in a few moments, Althea
+reappeared&mdash;I think she had leaped something. Her father was by her
+side, vastly proud and happy. Her mother (as I shall say for short)
+arrived from somewhere, with a gratified smile. Her big brother
+presently drew up alongside on<a class="pagenum" title="232" name="page_232" id="page_232"></a> a polo-pony, and gave her a big,
+flat-handed pat in the middle of her placard, and a handsome young
+woman, who was pointed out to us as the wife he had married in February,
+during our fortnight at Miami, reached up to her bridle-hand and gave it
+a squeeze. And there was a deep fringe of miscellaneous friends,
+acquaintances and rivals.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think of our daughter, now!" asked Johnny, loudly and
+generally, as he lifted Althea down. He looked about as if to sweep
+together the widest assemblage of praises and applause. Many flocked;
+many congratulated; but still further tribute must be levied. McComas
+caught sight of Albert. The young fellow stood on the edge of the thing,
+staring, embarrassed, shaken to his centre.</p>
+
+<p>"Here, you, Albert!" Johnny cried; "come over and shake hands with the
+winner!"</p>
+
+<p>And meanwhile, Raymond, off by himself somewhere or other, I suppose,
+may have been studying how in the world he was ever going to put Albert
+through Yale.<a class="pagenum" title="233" name="page_233" id="page_233"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="VI_4528" id="VI_4528"></a>
+<h2>VI</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Business once more!</p>
+
+<p>It ought to be barred. I get enough of it in my daily routine without
+having it intrude here. Business should do no more than provide the
+platform and the scenic background for the display of young love, hope
+and beauty. But here we have to deal with the affairs of a worried and
+incompetent man half way through his fifties.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond came in one morning, on my summons. His manner was depressed; it
+was becoming habitually so. I tried to cheer him with indifferent
+topics,&mdash;among them the horse-show, which I saw so unsatisfactorily and
+which I have described so inadequately. He had already heard about it
+from Albert, and he felt no relish for the friendliness Johnny McComas
+had displayed on that occasion.</p>
+
+<p>"Trying to get <i>him</i>, too?" was Raymond's comment.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I wouldn't quite say <i>that</i>...."</p>
+
+<p>"I have a letter from his mother. She wants to know about college."<a class="pagenum" title="234" name="page_234" id="page_234"></a></p>
+
+<p>"Well, how <i>are</i> things?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know; poor."</p>
+
+<p>"That Iowa company?"</p>
+
+<p>"Next year."</p>
+
+<p>"Again?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;next year; as usual."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I have news for you."</p>
+
+<p>"Good?" he asked, picking up a little.</p>
+
+<p>"That depends on how you look at it. I have a buyer for your house."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank God!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't hurry to thank God. Perhaps you will want to thank the Devil."</p>
+
+<p>Raymond's face fell. "You don't mean that <i>he</i>&mdash;on top of everything
+else&mdash;has come forward to&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"My friend! my friend! It isn't that at all. 'He' has nothing to do with
+it. Quite another party."</p>
+
+<p>And it was. A Mr. Gluckstein, a sort of impresario made suddenly rich by
+a few seasons with fiddlers and prima donnas, was the man. He was
+willing, he said,&mdash;and I paid the news out as evenly and considerately
+as I could,&mdash;he was willing to take the house<a class="pagenum" title="235" name="page_235" id="page_235"></a> and assume the
+mortgage&mdash;but he asked a bonus of five thousand dollars for doing it.</p>
+
+<p>"The scoundrel!" groaned Raymond, his face twisted by contemptuous rage.
+"The impudent scoundrel!"</p>
+
+<p>"Possibly so. But that is his offer&mdash;and the only one. And it is his
+best."</p>
+
+<p>Raymond sat with his eyes on the floor. He was afraid to let me see his
+face. He hated the house&mdash;it was an incubus, a millstone; but&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>He visibly despaired. "What shall I do about Albert's college, now?" he
+muttered presently.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed to have passed at a bound beyond the stage of sale and
+transfer. The odious property was off his hands&mdash;and every hope of a
+spare dollar had gone with it.</p>
+
+<p>"His mother writes&mdash;" began Raymond.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"She tells me&mdash;Well, her father died last month, it seems, and she is
+expecting something out of his estate...."</p>
+
+<p>"Estate? Is there one?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who can say? A man in that business!<a class="pagenum" title="236" name="page_236" id="page_236"></a> There might be something; there
+might be nothing or less. And it might take a year or more to get it."</p>
+
+<p>"And if there is anything?"</p>
+
+<p>"She says she will look after Albert's first year or two. I was about to
+refuse, but I expect I shall have to listen now."</p>
+
+<p>He was silent. Then he broke out:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"But there won't be. That old woman with her water-waves and her
+wrinkles is still hanging on; even if there should be anything, she
+would be the one to get most of it. I know her&mdash;she would snatch it
+all!"</p>
+
+<p>"Listen, Raymond," I said; "you had better let <i>me</i> help you here."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want you to. There must be some way to manage."</p>
+
+<p>He fell into thought.</p>
+
+<p>"I doubt if she can do anything, herself. Whatever she did would come
+through him in the end. You say he likes Albert?" He was silent again.
+"I don't want to meet either of them&mdash;but I would about as soon meet him
+as her."<a class="pagenum" title="237" name="page_237" id="page_237"></a></p>
+
+<p>I saw that he was nerving himself for another <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>. Well, it
+would be less trying than the first one. If his sense of form, his
+<i>flair</i> for fatalism, still persisted, ease was out of the question and
+no surrogate could serve.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, after all, there had been nothing between those two. Anyway, in
+the general eye the marriage had made everything right. She was
+accepted, certainly. And as certainly he had lived down, if he had ever
+possessed it, the reputation of a hapless husband.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote to her in a non-committal way&mdash;a letter which left loopholes,
+room for accommodation. Her reply suggested that he call at the bank;
+she would pass on the word. He told me he would try to do so. I saw the
+impudent concert-monger was to have his house.</p>
+
+<p>And so, one forenoon, at eleven or so, Raymond, after some
+self-drivings, reached the bank; by appointment, as he understood.
+Through the big doors; up the wide, balustraded stairway&mdash;it was the
+first time he<a class="pagenum" title="238" name="page_238" id="page_238"></a> had ever been in the place. He was well on the way to the
+broad, square landing, when some lively clerks or messengers, who had
+been springing along behind him, all at once slackened their pace and
+began to skirt the paneled marble walls. A number of prosperous
+middle-aged and elderly men were coming down together in a compact
+group. It seemed as if some directors' meeting was in progress&mdash;in
+progress from one office, or one building, to another. In the middle of
+the group was John W. McComas.</p>
+
+<p>He was absorbed, abstracted. Raymond, like some of the other up-farers,
+had gained the landing, and like them now stood a little to one side.
+McComas looked out at him with no particular expression and indeed with
+no markedness of attention.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you do?" he said indifferently.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm pretty well," said Raymond dispiritedly.</p>
+
+<p>"And that was all!" he reported next day in a high state of indignation.
+"Don't suppose I shall try it again!"</p>
+
+<p>But a careless Gertrude had failed to inform<a class="pagenum" title="239" name="page_239" id="page_239"></a> her husband of the
+appointment. She had been busy, or he had been away from home....</p>
+
+<p>"Go once more," I counseled, I pleaded.</p>
+
+<p>A note came to him from McComas&mdash;a decent, a civil. Come and talk things
+over&mdash;that was its purport. He went.</p>
+
+<p>McComas, as you can guess, was very bland, very expansive, very
+magnanimous (to his own sense). "I <i>like</i> Albert!" he declared heartily.
+But he did little to cloak the fact that it was his own money which was
+to carry the boy through college.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond was in the depths for a month. After Gluckstein had got his deed
+for the house and Albert had packed his trunk for the East, he felt that
+now indeed he had lost wife, home and son.<a class="pagenum" title="240" name="page_240" id="page_240"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="PART_VIII_4697" id="PART_VIII_4697"></a>
+<h2>PART VIII</h2>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="I_4703" id="I_4703"></a>
+<h2>I</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Before leaving his house for good and all, Raymond spent a dismal
+fortnight in going over old papers&mdash;out-of-date documents which once had
+interested his father and grandfather, books, diaries and memoranda
+which had occupied his own youthful days: the slowly deposited,
+encumbering sediment of three generations, long in one place. There were
+several faded agreements with the signature of the ineffable individual
+who had married into the family, had received a quit-claim to those
+suburban acres, and had then, at a point of stress, refused to give them
+back. There were sheaves of old receipted bills&mdash;among them one for the
+set of parlor furniture in the best (or the worst) style of the Second
+Empire. There were drafts of Raymond's early compositions&mdash;his first
+attempts at the essay and the short story; there was an ancient, heavily
+annotated<a class="pagenum" title="241" name="page_241" id="page_241"></a> Virgil (only six books), and there was a sheepskin algebra in
+which he had taken, by himself, a post-school course as a means of
+intellectual tonic, with extra problems dexterously worked out and
+inserted on bits of blue paper....</p>
+
+<p>"I filled the furnace seven times," he said to me, laconically.</p>
+
+<p>I myself felt the strain of it all. It is less wearing to move every two
+or three years, as most of us do, than to move but once&mdash;near the end of
+a long life, of a succession of lives.</p>
+
+<p>I never asked what Mr. Gluckstein thought of the orchestrion.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond went to live at a sort of private hotel. Here he read and wrote.
+He carried with him a set of little red guide-books, long, long since
+out of date, and he restudied Europe in the light of early memories. He
+also subscribed to a branch of a public library in the vicinity&mdash;a
+vicinity that seemed on the far edge of things. However, the tendency of
+the town has always been centrifugal. Many of our worthies, if they have
+held on to<a class="pagenum" title="242" name="page_242" id="page_242"></a> life long enough, have had to make the same disconcerting
+trek.</p>
+
+<p>From this retreat Raymond occasionally issued to concerts and
+picture-exhibitions. I do not know that he was greatly concerned for
+them; but they carried on a familiar tradition and gave employment still
+to a failing momentum.</p>
+
+<p>From this same retreat there would issue, about the Christmas season, a
+few watercolors on Italian subjects. If they were faint and feeble, I
+shall not say so. We ourselves have one of them&mdash;an indecisive view of
+the ruins in the Roman Forum. It is not quite the Forum I recall; but
+then, as we know, the Roman Forum, for the past half-century, has
+altered almost from year to year.</p>
+
+<p>Letters reached him occasionally from Albert the freshman. They might
+well have come from Albert the sophomore. Raymond showed me one of them
+on an evening when I had called to see him in his new quarters.</p>
+
+<p>He was comfortable enough and snug. On the walls and shelves were books
+and pictures<a class="pagenum" title="243" name="page_243" id="page_243"></a> that I remembered seeing in his boyhood bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>"I like it here," he said emphatically. And in truth it was the den of a
+born bachelor&mdash;one who had discovered himself too late.</p>
+
+<p>Well, Raymond passed me Albert's letter. He showed it to me, not with
+pride, but (as was evident from the questioning eye he kept on my face)
+with a view to learning what I thought of it. He was asking a verdict,
+yet shrinking from it.</p>
+
+<p>Albert was rather cocky; also, rather restless&mdash;I wondered if he would
+last to <i>be</i> a sophomore. And he displayed little of the consideration
+due a father. Clearly, Raymond, as a parent, had been weighed and found
+wanting. Albert's ideal stood high in another quarter, and his life's
+ambition might soon drive him in a direction the reverse of academic.</p>
+
+<p>"How does it strike you?" asked Raymond, as I sat mulling over Albert's
+sheets.</p>
+
+<p>I searched my mind for some non-committal response.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Raymond burst out, "he needn't respect <i>me</i> if he doesn't admire
+<i>him</i>!"<a class="pagenum" title="244" name="page_244" id="page_244"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="II_4786" id="II_4786"></a>
+<h2>II</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Albert's response to McComas at the horse-show had not been noticeably
+prompt or adroit, but he cast about manfully for words and presently was
+able to voice his appreciation of Althea's feat (as it was regarded) and
+to congratulate her upon it. Johnny McComas was not at all displeased.
+Albert had not been light-handed and graceful, but he developed (under
+this sudden stress) a sturdy, downright mode of speech which showed
+sincerity if not dexterity. The square-standing, straight-speaking
+farm-lad&mdash;straight-speaking, if none too ready&mdash;was sounding an
+atavistic note caught from his great-grandfather back in York State.</p>
+
+<p>"Stuff in him!" commented Johnny. "It's a wonder, but there is. Must be
+his mother."</p>
+
+<p>Albert made no particular impression, however, on Althea herself. A
+dozen other young fellows had been more demonstrative and more fluent.
+He simply slid over the surface of her mind and fell away again. She had
+known him&mdash;intermittently&mdash;for years as<a class="pagenum" title="245" name="page_245" id="page_245"></a> a somewhat inexpressive boy;
+now, as a potential gallant, he was negligible, as compared with others.
+But Albert, speaking in a sense either specific or general, did not mean
+to remain negligible.</p>
+
+<p>He soon forgot most of the details of the day at the horse-show. He had
+hardly a greater affinity for sport than his father had had. He began
+his sophomore year with no interest in athletics. The compulsory
+gymnasium-work bored him. He made no single team&mdash;put forth not the
+least effort to make one. The football crowd, the baseball crowd, even
+the tennis crowd, gave him up and left him alone.</p>
+
+<p>Yet his bodily energies and his mental ambitions were waxing daily; his
+passions too. There must be an outlet for all this vigor&mdash;business, or
+matrimony, or war. In one short twelvemonth he compassed all three.</p>
+
+<p>By the end of Albert's second year, the day had come when a
+self-respecting young man of fortune and position found it hard if he
+must confess: "I have taken all yet given nothing." The Great War waged
+more furiously than ever, and came more close. The country had<a class="pagenum" title="246" name="page_246" id="page_246"></a> first
+said, "You may," and, later, "You must." Albert did not wait for the
+"must." He closed his year a month or so in advance&mdash;as he had done once
+before&mdash;and enrolled in a college-unit for service abroad.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond gave his consent&mdash;a matter of form, a futility. In fact, Albert
+enrolled first and asked (or advised) later. His mother, of a mixed
+mind, would have interposed an objection. McComas hushed her down. "Let
+him go. He has the makings of a man. Don't cut off his best chance."</p>
+
+<p>McComas had a right to speak. Tom McComas was going too, and going with
+his father's warm approval. If he could leave a young wife and a
+three-year-old boy, need a young bachelor student be held back?</p>
+
+<p>Albert came West for a good-bye. His father held his hand and gave him a
+long scrutiny&mdash;part of the time with eyes wide open, part of the time
+with eyes closed to a fine, inquiring, studious line. But he never saw
+what there was to see. In his own body there was not one drop of martial
+blood; in his being not an iota of the bellicose spirit. Why<a class="pagenum" title="247" name="page_247" id="page_247"></a> men fight,
+even why boys fight&mdash;all this had been a mystery which he must take on
+faith, with little help from the fisticuffs and brawls of school-days,
+or even from the gigantic, agonizing closing-in of whole peoples, now
+under way.</p>
+
+<p>Yet Albert understood, and meant to take his share.</p>
+
+<p>Who, indeed, as Raymond had once asked petulantly, could know what a boy
+was going to be?</p>
+
+<p>When Althea saw Albert in khaki, she <i>saw</i> him: this time no
+indifference, no fusing him with the crowd, no letting him fade away
+unnoticed. If he had shaken before her on her hurdle-taker, she now
+shook before him in his brown regimentals. It was as if, in an instant, he
+had bolted from their familiar&mdash;their sometimes over-familiar&mdash;atmosphere.
+He confused, he perturbed her: he was so like, yet so different; so close,
+yet so remote. Was he a relative, of sorts&mdash;a relative in some loose
+sense; or was he a strange young hero, with his face set toward yet
+stranger scenes...?</p>
+
+<p>"Come," said her father, who was close<a class="pagenum" title="248" name="page_248" id="page_248"></a> by, between the horse-block and
+the syringa-bushes, "Albert isn't the only soldier on the battle-field.
+Look at Tom, here!"</p>
+
+<p>Althea turned her eyes dutifully toward her stalwart brother, who
+humorously put up his stiffened fingers to the stiff brim of his hat;
+and then she looked back at Albert.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="III_4874" id="III_4874"></a>
+<h2>III</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>McComas's bank, like others, put its office-machinery at the disposal of
+the Government, when the first war-loan was in the making. It seemed a
+small matter, at the beginning, but administrative organization was
+taxed and clerical labors piled up hugely as the big, slow event moved
+along through its various stages. This work in itself came almost to
+seem an adequate contribution to the cause; surely in the mere
+percentage of interest offered there was little to appeal to the
+financial public, except perhaps the depositors of savings banks.
+McComas himself felt no promptings to subscribe to this loan; but his
+directors thought that a reasonable degree of participation was
+"indicated." The bank's title="249" name<a class="pagenum" name="page_249" id="page_249"></a> went down, with the names of some others;
+and the clerks who had been working over hours on the new and exacting
+minuti&aelig; of the undertaking were given a chance to divert their savings
+toward the novel securities. The bank displayed the Nation's flag, and
+the flags of some of the allies. It all made a busy corner. McComas
+thought of his son in khaki, and felt himself warming daily as a
+patriot.</p>
+
+<p>"We can do them up," he declared. The war, with him, was still largely a
+matter of financial pressure. The pressure, even if exerted at long
+range, was bound to tell. Many of "our boys" would never get "over
+there" at all. They were learning how to safeguard our country's future
+within our country itself.</p>
+
+<p>His wife, who had been flitting from veranda to veranda in their
+pleasant suburban environment, and been doing, with other ladies of her
+circle, some desultory work for the wounded soldiers of the future, now
+came down to the centre of the town and took up the work in good
+earnest. She saw Tom McComas as a seasoned adult who could look after
+himself, but her own Albert was still a<a class="pagenum" title="250" name="page_250" id="page_250"></a> boy. It was easy to see him
+freezing, soaking, falling, lying in distress. She busied herself behind
+a great plate-glass window on a frequented thoroughfare&mdash;a window heaped
+with battered helmets and emptied shells that drew the idle curiosity or
+the poignant interest of the passer-by. Bandages, sweaters, iodine-tubes
+filled her thoughts and her hands. And Althea, in company with several
+sprightly and entertaining young girls of her own set, began to pick up
+some elementary notions in nursing.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it's the most delightfully absorbing thing I've ever done!" she
+declared. A new world was dawning&mdash;a red world that not all of us have
+been fated to meet so young.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond Prince saw all these preparations and took them as a spectacle.
+He was now frankly but an onlooker in life, and he gazed at big things
+from their far rim. He had no spare funds to put into federal hands, and
+felt by no means able to afford the conversion of any of his few
+remaining investments with a loss of nearly half his present returns. He
+viewed a patriotic parade or two from the<a class="pagenum" title="251" name="page_251" id="page_251"></a> curbstone and attended now
+and then some patriotic meeting in the public parks&mdash;a flag-raising, for
+example. On these occasions he preferred to stand at some remove, so
+that it would be unnecessary to raise his hat: the requirement of a
+formal salute made him distressingly self-conscious. Yet he was
+displeased if other men, no nearer, failed to lift theirs; and he would
+be indignant when young fellows, engaged in games near by, gave the
+exercises no heed at all.</p>
+
+<p>In one of the parades the flag of France went by. This was a picturesque
+and semi-exotic event; it stirred some memories of early days abroad,
+and Raymond, with an effort, did, stiffly and with an obvious (even an
+obtrusive) self-consciousness, manage to get off his hat. A highly vocal
+young man alongside looked at this cold and creaking man&oelig;uvre with
+disapproval, even disgust.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you holler?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>No, Raymond could not "holler." The dead hand of conscious propriety was
+upon him, checking any momentum that might lead to a spontaneous
+expression of patriotic feeling.<a class="pagenum" title="252" name="page_252" id="page_252"></a> The generous human juices could not
+run&mdash;could not even get started. When he said good-bye to Albert, it was
+not as to a son, nor even to a friend's son. Albert himself might have
+objected to any emotional expression that was too clearly to be seen;
+but he would have welcomed one which, cloaked in an unembarrassing
+obscurity, might at least have been felt. Johnny McComas frankly let
+himself "go," not only with Tom, but with Albert too. Albert could not
+but think within himself that it was all somewhat overdone; he was a bit
+abashed, even if not quite shamefaced. But the recollection of Johnny's
+warm hand-clasp and vibrant voice sometimes came to comfort him, in camp
+across the water, at times when the picture of his own father's chill
+adieux brought little aid.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="IV_4960" id="IV_4960"></a>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>A few brief months ended the foreign service of both our young men.
+Albert came home invalided, and Tom McComas along with others, lay dead
+between the opposing lines of trenches. His father would not, at<a class="pagenum" title="253" name="page_253" id="page_253"></a> first,
+credit the news. His son's very strength and vigor had helped build up
+his own exuberant optimism. It simply could not be; his son, his only
+remaining son, a happy husband, a gratified parent.... But the truth
+bore in, as the truth will, and McComas had his days of
+rebellious&mdash;almost of blasphemous&mdash;protest. The proud monument at
+Roselands was taking a cruel toll. His other son was commemorated on the
+third side of its base; but though a fresh unfrayed flag waved for
+months over turf below which no one lay, it was long before that great
+granite block came to betray to the world this latest and cruelest
+bereavement.</p>
+
+<p>Albert, whose injuries had made him appear as likely to be a useless
+piece on the board for longer than the army surgeons thought worth
+while, was sent back home and made his convalescence under the care of
+his mother; within her house, indeed&mdash;for his father had no quarters to
+offer him. Among McComas's flower-beds and garden-paths he enjoyed the
+ministrations of a physician other and better than any that practices on
+those fields of<a class="pagenum" title="254" name="page_254" id="page_254"></a> hate&mdash;one who complemented the prosaic physical cares
+required for the body with an affluent stream of healing directed toward
+both mind and heart. He had come back to be a hero to Althea, with
+evidences of his heroism graved on his own bruised form.</p>
+
+<p>"Hasn't he been wonderful!" said Althea to her girl friends; and Albert
+volunteered few concrete facts that might qualify or detract from her
+ideal.</p>
+
+<p>Those few months comprised his contribution to the cause. He mended more
+rapidly than might have been expected, and soon began to feel the
+resurgence of those belligerencies which are proper to the nature of the
+healthy young male. But his belligerencies were not at all militaristic.
+He had seen war at short range, knew what it was, and desired it no
+more. He meant to let loose his energies, as soon as might be, in that
+other warfare, business; it would be after the manner of a
+great-grandfather of whom a tradition persisted, and after the close
+pattern of a McComas still before his eyes. A hero, if they wished; but
+a hero with money in his pocket.<a class="pagenum" title="255" name="page_255" id="page_255"></a></p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, McComas looked at his grandson and writhed. So many openings,
+so many things to be done; yet what future aid had he to count on for
+carrying along his line and for reaping the opportunities in his field?
+A child of four, in rompers, pushing a little wheelbarrow of pebbles
+along garden-paths. The years dragged. It was all too great an irony.</p>
+
+<p>He sent for Albert. Albert still limped a little, but it was not to be
+for long.</p>
+
+<p>"You've done enough for your country," he declared with blunt emphasis.
+"Now do something for me. You're almost well?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think so."</p>
+
+<p>"You want to pitch in?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do."</p>
+
+<p>"You want to amount to something?" continued McComas, pausing on the
+edge of an invidious bit of characterization.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+
+<p>"You would like to come with me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes." Surely his own father could not help him to a future.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, take your choice. What do you want? Bank?"<a class="pagenum" title="256" name="page_256" id="page_256"></a></p>
+
+<p>But Albert had heard something about banks. Bank clerks, in these
+close-knit days, when anybody who fell out of the lock-step was lost,
+were but a sort of financial militia. Even if he were pushed along with
+the friendliest zeal, it might be years before he reached the place and
+the end desired. Nor had he much more fondness for growing up under the
+eye of McComas than under that of his own father.</p>
+
+<p>"Bank?" repeated McComas.</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>McComas grinned. It was the grin he used when greatly pleased.</p>
+
+<p>"One of those Western concerns?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Albert; "send me West."</p>
+
+<p>When Raymond heard that Albert had cast in his lot with McComas and
+meant soon to leave for Colorado, he winced. Albert, to him, was still a
+boy, and this term in the West but another kind of schooling. "Just as
+his mother tried to influence him before," said Raymond to me bitterly,
+"so McComas will influence him now." And I could not deny that McComas
+had the whip hand.<a class="pagenum" title="257" name="page_257" id="page_257"></a> The unintermittency of business correspondence, the
+cogency of a place on the payroll....</p>
+
+<p>No, it was not to be denied that Raymond had lost Albert finally.</p>
+
+<p>And Althea went to the train, to see him off&mdash;as to another war.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="V_5064" id="V_5064"></a>
+<h2>V</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>"Finally"&mdash;perhaps I have used the word too soon.</p>
+
+<p>I dropped in on Raymond, one evening, at his private hotel. It was about
+four months after Albert's departure for the West. His quarters seemed
+as snugly comfortable as ever, and as completely adapted to his
+ultimately discovered personality and its peculiar requirements. Raymond
+master of a big house! Raymond leading a public life!</p>
+
+<p>But he himself was perturbed. It was a letter from Albert&mdash;it was two or
+three letters, in fact.</p>
+
+<p>"He says he is going to marry her."</p>
+
+<p>"Her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Althea. Althea McComas."<a class="pagenum" title="258" name="page_258" id="page_258"></a></p>
+
+<p>Albert, in the West, had done well. He had taken hold immediately,
+decisively. The initiative which would never have developed under his
+father had been liberated during his war service and was now mounting to
+a still higher pitch among the mountains.</p>
+
+<p>"He is going to do," McComas had told me, after the second month. "He is
+a wonder," he had said, later.</p>
+
+<p>Be that as it may. McComas was doubtless inclined to the favorable view.
+He had determined in advance that Albert was to succeed. Albert was
+meeting, successfully, known expectations of success&mdash;as a young man
+may.</p>
+
+<p>"He started so well," said his father. "And now...."</p>
+
+<p>"And now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Now he wants to marry the daughter of a stable-boy!"</p>
+
+<p>"Raymond," I said; "drop the 'stable-boy.' That was never true; and if
+it were it would have no relevancy here and now."</p>
+
+<p>"I should say not! Why, Albert&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You have told him? He knows your&mdash;He knows the&mdash;the legend?"<a class="pagenum" title="259" name="page_259" id="page_259"></a></p>
+
+<p>"He does. And as you see, it makes no difference to him."</p>
+
+<p>"Why should it? Why should he care for early matters that were over and
+past long years before he was born? He sees what he sees. He feels what
+he feels."</p>
+
+<p>"He feels McComas."</p>
+
+<p>"Why shouldn't he? Who wouldn't?"</p>
+
+<p>Raymond relapsed into a moody silence. I saw, presently, that he was
+trying to break from it. He had another consideration to offer.</p>
+
+<p>"And then," he began, "about&mdash;his mother. He must have
+understood&mdash;something. He must know&mdash;by now."</p>
+
+<p>"Know?" I returned. "If he does, he has the advantage over all the rest
+of us. <i>I</i> don't 'know.' <i>You</i> don't 'know.' Neither does anybody else.
+Another old matter&mdash;as well rectified as society and its usages can
+manage, and best left alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's&mdash;it's indelicate. Albert ought to feel that."</p>
+
+<p>"Raymond!" I protested. "We must leave it to the young to smooth over
+the rough old<a class="pagenum" title="260" name="page_260" id="page_260"></a> places and to salve the aching old sores. That's their
+great use and function."</p>
+
+<p>"Not Albert's," he said stubbornly. "I don't want him to do it, and I
+don't want it done in that way."</p>
+
+<p>Another silence. I could see that he was gathering force for still
+another objection.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a desertion," said the undying egoist. "It's a piece of treachery.
+It's a going over to the enemy."</p>
+
+<p>"If you mean McComas, Albert went over months ago. And he doesn't seem
+to have lost anything by doing so," I ventured to add.</p>
+
+<p>"This marriage would clinch it, would confirm it. I should lose him at
+last, and completely, just as I have lost&mdash;everything."</p>
+
+<p>"Raymond," I could scarcely keep from saying, "you deceive yourself. You
+have really never cared for Albert at all. The only concern here is your
+own pride&mdash;the futile working of a will that is too weak to get its own
+way."</p>
+
+<p>But I kept silence, and he continued the<a class="pagenum" title="261" name="page_261" id="page_261"></a> silence. Yet I felt that he
+was gathering force for the greatest objection of all.</p>
+
+<p>"I have heard them spoken of," he said, after a little, "as&mdash;as brother
+and sister. For them to marry! It's unseemly."</p>
+
+<p>"Raymond!" I protested again, with even more vigor than before. "Why
+must you say a thing like that?"</p>
+
+<p>"The same father and mother&mdash;now. Living together&mdash;going about together
+as members of one family.... They did, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, for a few weeks in the year. 'One family'? What is the mere label?
+Nothing. What is the real situation? Everything. Of blood-relationship
+not a trace. Why, even cousins marry&mdash;but here are two strains
+absolutely different.... Have you," I asked, "have you brought up this
+point with&mdash;Albert?"</p>
+
+<p>Raymond glanced at the letters.</p>
+
+<p>"You have! And he says what I say!"</p>
+
+<p>Raymond put the letters away.</p>
+
+<p>Albert had doubtless said much more&mdash;and said it with the vigor of
+indignant youth.<a class="pagenum" title="262" name="page_262" id="page_262"></a></p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="VI_5188" id="VI_5188"></a>
+<h2>VI</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>At a wedding the father of the bridegroom need not be conspicuous&mdash;least
+of all when the wedding takes place in a church. He may avoid, better
+than at a home wedding, too close contact with the various units of the
+bridal party. In view of such considerations, Raymond Prince was able to
+be present, with discomfort minimized, at his son's marriage.</p>
+
+<p>We attended, too, of course. My wife has a woman's fondness for
+weddings&mdash;and so has our Elsie.</p>
+
+<p>It came in June. The church was <i>the</i> church&mdash;the church with the elms
+and ash-trees around it, the triangular lawn with the hydrangeas and
+elderberry-bushes blossoming here and there, and the gardens and
+plantations of private wealth looking across from all sides; the church
+where everybody who is anybody gets married as a matter of course&mdash;at
+that time of year; the church which has plenty of room for limousines on
+both sides of its converging streets, and on a third cross-street<a class="pagenum" title="263" name="page_263" id="page_263"></a> close
+by; the church which has the popular and sympathetic rector, who has
+known you ever since you were a boy (or girl), the competent organist,
+and the valiant surpliced choir (valiant though small); the church
+which, under its broad squat tower and low spire, possesses, about its
+altar-rail, room for many palms and rubber-plants and for as many
+bridesmaids and ushers as the taste of the high contracting parties may
+require:&mdash;a space reached by a broad flight of six or seven steps, and
+wide enough for any deployment, high enough for the whole assemblage to
+see, and grand enough (with its steps and all) to make a considerable
+effect when the first notes of the Wedding March sound forth and the
+newly wedded couple walk down and out into married life.</p>
+
+<p>"Be married in your uniform!" Johnny McComas had said effusively.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm not in the service, now...." replied Albert.</p>
+
+<p>"You have been, haven't you? Haven't you?" Johnny repeated, as if there
+could be two answers.<a class="pagenum" title="264" name="page_264" id="page_264"></a></p>
+
+<p>"Why, I was only a private...." Albert submitted.</p>
+
+<p>"So were lots of other good fellows."</p>
+
+<p>"It's soiled," said Albert. "There's a stain on the shoulder."</p>
+
+<p>"All the better. We've done something for the country. Let those people
+know it."</p>
+
+<p>So Albert walked down the aisle in khaki.</p>
+
+<p>Althea was in white&mdash;my wife named the material expertly. She wore a
+long veil. There were flower-girls, too,&mdash;my wife knew their names.</p>
+
+<p>"She's the most beautiful bride I ever saw!" my wife declared. "This is
+the most beautiful wedding I ever attended!" She always says that.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny McComas was in white, too. As he stood beside the bridal pair he
+seemed almost too festive, too estival, too ebullient for this poor
+earth of ours. His wife, whose costume I will not describe and whose
+state of mind I shall not explore, showed a subdued sedateness&mdash;though a
+glad&mdash;which restored the balance.</p>
+
+<p>Raymond Prince saw the ceremony from one of the back pews. If he
+attended the out-of-door reception at the house, it must have been but
+briefly: I quite missed him there. For him the wedding proper had been
+less a ceremony than a parade. I can fancy how he resented the
+organist's grand outburst and the triumphal descent (undeniably
+effective) of the bridal party over those six or seven steps. Again he
+was an unregarded and negligible spectator. I presume he missed Johnny's
+hand in Albert's, and Johnny's pressure on Albert's shoulder&mdash;the one
+with the stain; and I hope he did. It was the hand of the stronger,
+taking possession. "My prop, my future mainstay!" said Johnny's action.</p>
+
+<p>And it was as an unregarded and negligible spectator&mdash;now his permanent
+r&ocirc;le&mdash;that Raymond Prince took the slow train back to town.</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">THE END</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+
+<p style="text-align: center; font-size: smaller;">The Riverside Press<br />
+CAMBRIDGE &middot; MASSACHUSETTS<br />
+U &middot; S &middot; A</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of On the Stairs, by Henry B. Fuller
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@@ -0,0 +1,5474 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of On the Stairs, by Henry B. Fuller
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: On the Stairs
+
+Author: Henry B. Fuller
+
+Release Date: May 26, 2007 [EBook #21613]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE STAIRS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+ON THE STAIRS
+
+by
+Henry B. Fuller
+
+Author of _Lines Long and Short_
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+1918
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY HENRY B. FULLER
+
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+_Published March 1918_
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+This volume may seem less a Novel than a Sketch of a Novel or a Study
+for a Novel. It might easily be amplified; but, like other recent work
+of mine, it was written in the conviction that story-telling, whatever
+form it take, can be done within limits narrower than those now
+generally employed.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+ON THE STAIRS
+
+PART I
+
+I
+
+
+In the year 1873--
+
+No, do not turn away from such an opening; I shall reach our own day
+within a paragraph or so.
+
+In the year 1873, then, Johnny McComas was perfectly willing to stand to
+one side while Raymond Prince, surrounded by several of the fellows,
+came down, in his own negligent and self-assured way, the main stairway
+of Grant's Private Academy. For Johnny was newer there; Johnny was
+younger in this world by a year or two, at an age when a year or two
+makes a difference; and Johnny had but lately left behind what might be
+described as a condition of servitude. So Johnny yielded the right of
+way. He lowered his little snub nose by a few degrees, took some of the
+gay smile out of his twinkling blue eyes, and waited with an upward
+glance of friendly yet deferential sobriety until Raymond should have
+passed.
+
+"How are you, Johnny?" asked Raymond carelessly.
+
+"I'm pretty well," replied Johnny, in all modesty.
+
+In the year 1916--
+
+Yes, I told you we should reach our own times presently.
+
+In the year 1916, then, Raymond Prince was standing to one side, whether
+willing or not, while John W. McComas, attended by several men who would
+make their cares his own, came down the big marble stairway of the
+Mid-Continent National Bank. Raymond, who had his cares too, would
+gladly have been included in the company (or, rather, have replaced it
+altogether); but he saw clearly that the time was not propitious.
+McComas looked out through this swarm of lesser people, half-saw Prince
+as in a mist, and gave him unsmilingly an abstracted half-bow.
+
+"How do you do?" he mumbled impersonally.
+
+"I'm pretty well," returned Prince, in a toneless voice. But he was far
+from that, whether in mind or estate.
+
+Between these two dates and these two incidents lies most of my story.
+Be quite sure that I shall tell it in my own fashion.
+
+
+II
+
+First, however, this: I do not intend to magnify the Academy and its
+stairway. The Academy did very well in its day, and it happened to be
+within easy distance of James Prince's residence. If its big green doors
+were flanked on one side by a grocery and on the other by a laundry, and
+if its stairway was worn untidily by other feet than those of Dr.
+Grant's boys, I shall simply point out that this was all in the day of
+small things and that Fastidiousness was still upon her way. Should this
+not satisfy you, I will state that, in the year following, the Academy
+moved into other quarters: it lodged itself in a near-by private
+residence whose owner, in real estate, sensed down-heeled Decadence
+stealing that way a few years before any of his neighbors felt it, and
+who made his shifts accordingly. If even this does not satisfy you, I
+might sketch the entrance and stairway, somewhere in Massachusetts,
+which are to know the footfalls of Lawrence D. McComas, aged ten,
+grandson of Johnny; but such a step would perhaps take us too far afield
+as well as slightly into the future. One does not pass a lad through
+_that_ gateway on the spur of the moment.
+
+Nor ought I to magnify, on the other hand, the marble stairway of the
+Mid-Continent. This was not one of the town's greater banks; and the
+stairway was at the disposal not only of the bank's clientele, but at
+that of sixteen tiers of tenants. However, it represented some advanced
+architect's ideal of grandeur, and it served to make the bank's
+president seem haughty when in truth he was only preoccupied.
+
+As you may now surmise, this story, even at its highest, will not throw
+millions on the habituated and indifferent air; nor, at its most
+distended, will it push the pride of life too far. That has been done
+already in sufficing measure by many others. Let us ride here an even
+keel and keep well within rule and reason.
+
+I am simply to tell you how, as the years moved on, John McComas climbed
+the stairs of life from the bottom to the top--or so, at least, he was
+commonly considered to have done; and how, through the same years,
+Raymond Prince passed slowly and reluctantly along the same stairs from
+top to bottom--or so his critics usually regarded his course. Nor
+without some color of justice, I presume that they will pass each other
+somewhere near the middle of my volume.
+
+
+III
+
+In 1873 James Prince was living in a small, choice residential district
+near the Lake. Its choiceness was great, but was not duly guarded. The
+very smallness of the neighborhood--a triumphant record of early
+fortunes--put it upon a precarious basis: there was all too slight a
+margin against encroachments. And, besides, the discovery came to be
+made, some years later, that it was upon the wrong side of the river
+altogether. But it held up well in 1873; and it continued to do so
+through the eighties. Perhaps it was not until the middle or later
+nineties that the real exodus began. Some of the early magnates had
+died; some had evaporated financially; others had come to perceive,
+either for themselves or through their children, that the road to social
+consideration now ran another way. In due course a congeries of bulky
+and grandiose edifices, built lavishly in the best taste of their own
+day, remained to stare vacantly at the infrequent passer-by, or to
+tremble before the imminent prospect of sinking to unworthy uses: odd,
+old-time megatheriums stranded ineptly in their mortgage-mud. But
+through the seventies the neighborhood held up its head and people came
+from far to see it.
+
+James Prince lived in one of these houses; and, around the corner, old
+Jehiel Prince lingered on in another.
+
+James was, of course, Raymond's father. Jehiel was his grandfather.
+Raymond, when we take him up, was at the age of thirteen. And Johnny
+McComas, if you care to know, was close on twelve.
+
+Jehiel Prince was of remote New England origin, and had come West by way
+of York State. He had been born somewhere between Utica and Rochester.
+He put up his house on no basis of domestic sociability; it was designed
+as a sort of monument to his personal success. He had not left the East
+to be a failure, or to remain inconspicuous. His contractor--or his
+architect, if one had been employed--had imagined a heavy, square affair
+of dull-red brick, with brown-stone trimmings in heavy courses. Items: a
+high basement, an undecorated mansard in slate; a big, clumsy pair of
+doors, set in the middle of all, at the top of a heavily balustraded
+flight of brown-stone steps; one vast window on the right of the doors
+to light the "parlor," and another like it, on the left, to light the
+"library": a facade reared before any allegiance to "periods," and in a
+style best denominated local or indigenous. Jehiel was called a
+capitalist and had a supplementary office in the high front basement;
+and here he was fretting by himself, off and on, in 1873; and here he
+continued to fret by himself, off and on, until 1880, when he fretted
+himself from earth. He was an unhappy man, with no essential mastery of
+life. His wife existed somewhere upstairs. They seldom spoke--indeed
+seldom met--unless papers to shift the units of a perplexed estate were
+up for consideration. Sometimes her relatives stole into the house to
+see her and hoped, with fearfulness, not to meet her husband in some
+passageway. He himself had plenty of relatives, by blood as well as by
+marriage; too many of these were rascals, and they kept him busy. The
+town, in the seventies, was at the adventurous, formative stage; almost
+everybody was leaving the gravel walks of Probity to take a short cut
+across the fair lawns of Success, and the social landscape was a good
+deal cut up and disfigured.
+
+"Poor relations!"--such was Jehiel's brief, scornful rating of the less
+capable among these supernumeraries. A poor relation represented, to
+him, the lowest form of animal life.
+
+And when the chicane and intrigue of the more clever among them roused
+his indignation he would exclaim: "They're putting me through the
+smut-machine!"--an ignominious, exasperating treatment which he refused
+to undergo without loud protests. These protests often reduced his wife
+to trembling and to tears. At such times she might hide an elder
+sister--one on the pursuit of some slight dole--in a small back bedroom,
+far from sight and hearing.
+
+An ugly house, inhabited by unhappy people. Perhaps I should brighten
+things by bringing forward, just here, Elsie, Jehiel's beautiful
+granddaughter. But he had no granddaughter. We must let Elsie pass.
+
+Yet a fresh young shoot budding from a gnarled old trunk would afford a
+piquant contrast--has done so hundreds of times. Jehiel Prince
+undoubtedly _was_ gnarled and old and tough; a charming granddaughter to
+cajole or wheedle him in the library, or to relax his indignant tension
+over young men during their summer attendance on swing or hammock, would
+have her uses. Yet a swing or a hammock would suggest, rather than the
+bleak stateliness of Jehiel's urban environment, some fair, remote
+domain with lawns and gardens; and Jehiel was far from possessing--or
+from wanting to possess--a country-house. Elsie may be revived, if
+necessary; but I can promise nothing. I rather think you have heard the
+last of her.
+
+James lived a few hundred yards from his father; his house bulked to
+much the same effect. It was another symmetrical, indigenous box--in
+stone, however, and not in brick. It had its mortgage. If this mortgage
+was ever paid up, another came later--a mortgage which passed through
+various renewals and which, as values were falling, was always renewed
+for a lesser amount and was always demanding ready money to meet the
+difference. In later years Raymond, with this formidable weight still
+pressing upon him, received finally an offer of relief and liberation;
+some prosperous upstart, with plans of his own, said he would chance the
+property, mortgage and all, if paid a substantial bonus for doing so.
+
+The premises included a stable. I mention the stable on account of
+Johnny McComas. He lived in it. Downstairs, the landau and the two
+horses, and another horse, and a buggy and phaeton, and sometimes a cow;
+upstairs, Johnny and his father and mother. Johnny could look out
+through a crumpled dimity curtain across the back yard and could see his
+father freezing ice-cream on a Sunday forenoon on the back kitchen
+porch; and he could also look into one of Raymond's windows on the floor
+above.
+
+Every so often he would beg:--
+
+"Oh, father, let me do it,--please!"
+
+Then he would lose the double prospect and get, instead, a plate of
+vanilla with a tin spoon in it.
+
+Raymond, who had no mastering passion for games, sat a good deal in his
+room, sometimes at one of the side windows; occasionally at the back
+one, in which case Johnny was quite welcome to look. Raymond had more
+desks than one, and books everywhere on the walls between them. He had a
+strong bent toward study, and was even beginning to dip into literary
+composition. He studied when he might better have been at play, and he
+kept up his diary under a student lamp into all hours of the night. He
+had been reading lately about Paris, and he was piecing out the
+elementary instruction of the Academy by getting together a collection
+of French grammars and dictionaries. He had about decided that sometime
+he would go to live on that island in the Seine near Notre Dame.
+
+His father told him he was working too hard and too late--that it would
+hurt his health and probably injure his eyes. His mother made no comment
+and gave no advice. She was an invalid and thus had absorbing interests
+of her own. Raymond kept on reading and writing.
+
+Perhaps I should begin to sketch, just about here, his awakening regard
+for some Gertrude or Adele, and his young rivalry with Johnny McComas
+for her favor; telling how Johnny won over Raymond the privilege of
+carrying her books to school, and how, in the end, he won Gertrude or
+Adele herself from Raymond, and married her. Fiddlesticks! Please put
+all such conventional procedures out of your head, and take what I am
+prepared to give you. The school was a boys' school. There was no
+Gertrude or Adele--as yet--any more than there was an Elsie. Raymond
+kept to his books and indulged in no juvenile philanderings. Forget all
+such foolish stereotypings of fancy.
+
+As for the romance and the rivalry: when that came, it came with a vast
+difference.
+
+
+IV
+
+Jehiel Prince was a capitalist. So was James: a capitalist, and the son
+of a capitalist. They had some interests in common, and others apart.
+There was a bank, and there were several large downtown business-blocks
+whose tenants required a lot of bookkeeping, and there was a horse-car
+line. There was a bus-line, too, between the railroad depots and the
+hotels. James destined Raymond for the bank. He would hardly go to
+college, but at seventeen or so would begin on the collection-register
+or some such matter; later he might come to be a receiving-teller;
+pretty soon he might rise to an apprehension of banking as a science
+and have a line as an official in the _Bankers' Gazette_. Beyond that he
+might go as far as he was able. James thought that, thus favored in
+early years, the boy might go far.
+
+But Raymond had just taken on Rome, and was finding it even more
+interesting than Paris. The Academy's professor of ancient history began
+to regard him as a prodigy. Then, somehow or other, Raymond got hold of
+Gregorovius, with his "City of Rome in the Middle Ages"--though his
+teacher did not know of this, and would have been sure to consider it an
+undesirable deviation from the straight and necessary path; and
+thenceforth the dozens of ordinary boys about him counted, I feel sure,
+for less than ever.
+
+Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put myself into the story
+as one of the characters. Then the many I's will no longer refer to the
+author named on the title-page, but will represent the direct
+participation--direct, even though inconspicuous--of a person whose
+name, status, and general nature will be made manifest, incidentally
+and gradually, as we proceed. You object that though one's status and
+general nature may be revealed "gradually," such can scarcely be the
+case as regards one's name? But if I tell you that my Christian name is,
+let us say, Oliver, and then intimate in some succeeding section that my
+surname is Ormsby, and then do not disclose my middle initial--which may
+be W--until the middle of the book (in some documentary connection,
+perhaps), shall I not be doing the thing "gradually"?
+
+Oliver W. Ormsby. H'm! I'm not so sure that I like it. Well, my name may
+turn out, after all, to be something quite different. And possibly I may
+be found to be without any middle initial whatever.
+
+But to return to the method itself. You will find it pursued in many
+good novels and in many bad ones; with admirable discretion--to make an
+instance--in "The Way of All Flesh"; and the procedure may be humbly
+copied here. It will involve, of course, a rather close attendance on
+both Raymond and Johnny through a long term of years; but perhaps the
+difficulties involved--or, rather, the awkwardnesses--can be got round
+in one way or another.
+
+At the Academy we like Raymond well enough, on the whole--
+
+You see at once how the method applies: I make myself an attendant
+there, and I place my age midway between the ages of the other two.
+
+As I say, we liked Raymond well enough, yet did not quite feel that he
+coalesced. "Coalesced" was hardly the word we used--such verbal
+grandeurs were reserved for our "compositions"; but you know what I
+mean. Another point to be made clear without delay is this: that when
+Johnny appeared at the Academy, he had lately left behind him the
+previous condition of servitude involved in a lodgment above the landau,
+the phaeton, and sometimes the cow. His father and mother, as I saw them
+and remember them, appeared to be rather nice people. Perhaps they had
+lately come from some small country town and had not been able, at
+first, to realize themselves and their abilities to the best advantage
+in the city. Assuredly his father knew how to drive horses and to care
+for them; and he had an intuitive knack for safeguarding his
+self-respect. And Johnny's mother was perfectly competent to cook and to
+keep house--even above a stable--most neatly. If Johnny's curtain was
+rumpled, that was Johnny's own incorrigible fault. The window-sill was a
+wide one, and Johnny, I found, used it as a catch-all. He kept there a
+few boxes of "bugs," as we called his pinned-down specimens, and an
+album of postage-stamps that was always in a state of metamorphosis. He
+had some loose stamps too, and sometimes, late in the afternoon or on
+Saturdays, we "traded." Johnny's mother was likely to caution us about
+her freshly scrubbed floors, and sometimes gave me a cooky on my
+leaving. I never heard of Raymond's having been there.
+
+But presently the trading stopped, and the "bugs," however firmly pinned
+down, took their flight. Johnny's father and mother "moved"--that was
+the brief, unadorned, sufficing formula. It was all accepted as
+inevitable; hardly for a boy a little past twelve, like myself, to
+question the movements of Olympian elders; nor even, in fact, to feel an
+abiding interest in them when I had seen them but three or four times in
+all. I never speculated--never asked where they had come from; never
+considered the nature of their tenure (not wondering how much Johnny's
+father may have been paid for driving the two bays and washing the
+parlor and bedroom windows and milking the cow, when there was one, and
+not figuring the reduction in wages due to the renting value of the
+three or four small rooms they occupied); nor did I much concern myself
+as to whither they might have gone. Probably opportunity had opened up a
+more promising path. However, the path did not lead far; for Johnny, a
+month or two later, made his first appearance at the Academy, on the
+opening of the fall term. During the preceding year he had been going to
+a public school "across the tracks" and had played with a boisterous
+crowd in a big cindered yard.
+
+Therefore, when Raymond, surrounded by half a dozen other boys, took
+occasion, on the stairs, to say:--
+
+"How are you, Johnny?"--
+
+And Johnny, with his back to the wall of the landing, replied:--
+
+"I'm pretty well,"--
+
+Johnny may have meant that, despite the novelty and the strangeness of
+his situation, he was very well, indeed; feeling, doubtless, that he was
+finally where he had a right to be and that his alert face was turned
+the proper way.
+
+The boys about Raymond were asking him to take part in a football game.
+It was not that Raymond was especially popular; but he could run. In
+that simple day football was football--principally a matter of running
+and of straightforward kicking; and Raymond could do both better than
+any other boy in the school. He could also outjump any of us--when he
+would take the trouble to try. In fact, his physical faculties were in
+his legs; his arms were nowhere. He was never able to throw either far
+or straight. Some of his early attempts at throwing were met with
+shouts of ridicule, and he never tried the thing further. If he fell
+upon the ill luck of finding a ball in his hands, he would toss it to
+somebody else with an air of facetious negligence. To stand, as Johnny
+McComas could stand, and throw a ball straight up for seventy-five feet
+and then catch it without stirring a foot from the spot where he was
+planted, would have been an utter impossibility for him. In fact,
+Raymond simply cultivated his obviously natural gifts; he never exerted
+himself systematically to make good any of his deficiencies. He was so
+as a boy; and he remained so always.
+
+In those early days we had no special playgrounds. We commonly used the
+streets. There was little traffic. Pedestrians took their chances on the
+sidewalks with leapfrog and the like, and we took ours, in turn, in the
+wide roadway with "pom-pom-peel-away" and similar games. Football,
+however, would take us to a vacant corner lot, some two streets away.
+Some absentee owner in the East was doubtless paying taxes on it with
+hopes of finally recouping himself through the unearned increment.
+Meanwhile it ran somewhat to rubbish and tin cans, to bare spots from
+which adjoining homemakers had removed irregular squares of turf, and to
+holes in the dry, brown earth where potatoes had been baked with a
+minimum of success and a maximum of wood ashes and acrid smoke. It was
+on the way to this frequented tract that Raymond carelessly let fall a
+word about Johnny McComas. Perhaps he need not have said that Johnny had
+lately been living above his father's stable--but he spoke without
+special animus. A few of the boys thought Johnny's intrusion odd, even
+cheeky; but most of them, employing the social assimilability of
+youth,--especially that of youth in the Middle West,--laid little stress
+upon it. Johnny made his place, in due time and on his own merits. Or
+shall I say, rather, by his own powers?
+
+
+V
+
+You are not to suppose that while I was free to visit Johnny in the
+stable, I was not free to visit Raymond in the house. Though my people
+lived rather modestly on a side street, the interior of the Prince
+residence was not unknown to me. On one occasion Raymond took me up to
+his room so that I might hear some of his writings. He had been to
+Milwaukee or to Indianapolis, and had found himself moved to set down an
+account of his three days away from home. He led me through several big
+rooms downstairs before we got to his own particular quarters above. The
+furnishing of these rooms impressed me at the time; but I know, now,
+that they were heavy and clumsy when they were meant to be rich and
+massive, and were meretricious when they were meant to be elegant. It
+was all of the Second Empire, qualified by an erratic, exaggerated touch
+that was natively American. I am afraid I found it rather superb and was
+made uncomfortable--was even intimidated by it; all the more so that
+Raymond took it completely for granted. One room contained a big
+orchestrion with many pipes in tiers, like an organ's. On one occasion I
+heard it play the overture to "William Tell," and it managed the
+"Storm" very handily. There was a large, three-cornered piano in the
+same room--one of the sort I never could feel at home with; and this
+instrument, more than the other, I suppose, gave Raymond his futile and
+disadvantageous start toward music. Travel; art; anything but the bank.
+
+I have no idea at what time of day he introduced me into the house, but
+it was an hour at which the men, as well as the women, were at home. In
+one part or another of the hall I met his mother. She was dark and lean;
+without being tall, she looked gaunt. She seemed occupied with herself,
+as she moved out of one shadow into another, and she gave scant
+attention to a casual boy. Raymond was really no more hospitable than
+any young and growing organism must be; but perhaps she was thankful
+that it was only one boy, instead of three or four.
+
+In another room, somewhere on the first floor, I had a glimpse of his
+father. I remember him as a sedate man who did not insist. If he set a
+boy right, it was done but verbally; the boy was left to see the
+justness of the point and to act on it for himself. I gathered, later,
+that James Prince had done little, unaided, for himself; whatever he had
+accomplished had been in conjunction with other men--with his father,
+particularly; and when his father died, a few years later, he was the
+chief heir--and he never added much to what he had received. To him fell
+the property--and its worries. The worries, I surmise, were the greater
+part of it all. Everything has to be paid for, and James Prince's easily
+gained success was paid for, through the ensuing years, with
+considerable anxieties and perturbations.
+
+It was his father, I presume, who was with him as I passed the library
+door: a bent, gray man, with a square head and a yellow face. A third
+man was between them; a tall, dry, cold fellow with iron-gray beard and
+no mustache--a face in the old New England tradition. This man was, of
+course, their lawyer, and I judge that he gave them little comfort. I
+felt him as chill and slow, as enjoying the tying and untying of
+legalities with a stiff, clammy hand, and as unlikely to be hurried on
+account of any temperament possessed by himself or manifested by his
+clients. Fire, in a wide sweep, had overtaken the town a year or two
+before--a community owned by the Eastern seaboard and mortgaged to its
+eyebrows; and the Princes, as I learned years later, had been building
+extensively on borrowed capital just before the fire-doom came. Probably
+too great a part of the funds employed came from their own bank.
+
+Raymond, once the second floor was reached, showed me his desks and
+bookcases; also a new sort of pen which he had thought to be able to
+use, but which he had cast aside. And he offered to read me his account
+of the three days in Milwaukee, or wherever.
+
+"If you would like to hear...?" he said, with a sort of bashful
+determination.
+
+"Just as you please," I replied, patient then, as ever after, in the
+face of the arts.
+
+Nothing much seemed to have happened--nothing that I, at least, should
+have taken the trouble to set down; but a good part of his fifteen
+pages, as he read them, seemed interesting and even important. I suppose
+this came from the way he did it. As early as thirteen he had the
+knack; then, and always after, he enjoyed writing for its own sake. I
+feel sure that his father did not quite approve this taste. His
+grandfather, who had had a lesser education and felt an exaggerated
+respect for learning, may have had more patience. He talked for years
+about endowing some college, but never did it; when the time finally
+came, he was far too deep in his financial worries.
+
+James Prince, as I have noted, occasionally mentioned to Raymond his
+conviction that he was wasting his time with all this scribbling, and
+that so much work by artificial light was imperiling his eyesight.
+
+"What good is it all going to do you?" I once heard him ask. His tone
+was resigned, as if he had put the question several times before. "I
+don't think I'd write quite so much, if I were you."
+
+Raymond looked at him in silence. "Not write?" he seemed to say. "You
+might as well ask me not to breathe."
+
+"At least do it by daylight," his father suggested, or
+counseled,--scarcely urged. "You won't have any eyes at all by the time
+you're thirty."
+
+But Raymond liked his double student-lamp with green shades. He liked
+the quiet and retirement of late hours. I believe he liked even the
+smell and smear of the oil.
+
+His father spoke, as I have reported; but he never took away the pen or
+put the light out. The boy seemingly had too strong a "slant": a
+misfortune--or, at least, a disadvantage--which a concerned parent must
+somehow endure. But he did take a more decided tack later on: he never
+said a word about Raymond's going to college, and Raymond, as a fact,
+never went. He fed his own intellectual furnace, and fed it in his own
+way. He learned an immense number of useless and unrelated things. In
+time they came to cumber him. Perhaps college would have been better,
+after all.
+
+I never knew Raymond to show any affection for either of his parents;
+and he had no brothers and sisters. His father was an essentially kind,
+just man, and might have welcomed an occasional little manifestation of
+feeling. One day he told Raymond he had no heart. That was as far as
+emotion and the expression of emotion could carry him. Raymond's mother
+might have been kindly too, if she had not had herself. But a new
+doctor, a new remedy, a new draught from a new quarter--and her boy was
+instantly nowhere. Raymond's own position seemed to be that life in
+families was the ordained thing and was to be accepted. Well, this was
+the family ordained for him, and he would put up with it as best he
+might. But I kept on developing my own impression of him; and I see now
+just what that impression was going to be. Raymond, almost from the
+start, felt himself as an independent, detached, isolated individual,
+and he must have his little zone of quiet round him. Why in the world he
+should ever have married...!
+
+I never knew him to show gratitude for anything given him by his
+parents. On the other hand, I never heard him ask them for anything. He
+possessed none of the little ingenuities by which boys sometimes secure
+a bit of pocket-money. If he wanted anything, he went without it until
+it was offered. Frankly, he seldom had to wait long.
+
+Not that what came was always the right thing. He showed me his
+fountain-pen--one of the early half-failures--with some disdain. He
+always carried a number of things in his pocket, but never the pen. I
+myself tried it one day, and it went well enough; I should have been
+glad to have it for my own. But steel pens sufficed him; save once, when
+I saw him, in a high mood, experimenting fantastically with a quill one.
+
+He cared no more about his clothes than any of the rest of us. He never
+laid any real stress on them at any time of life. He developed early a
+notion of the sufficiency of interior furnishings; mere external
+upholstery never quite secured his interest. I heard his father once or
+twice complain of his looking careless and shabby. He waited with
+equanimity until his father could take him to the clothier's. He asked
+but one thing; that there should be no indulgence in sartorial
+novelties at his expense. And I never met a sedater taste in neckties.
+
+Three or four were hanging over the gas-jet, close to the window; they
+were all dark blues or grays, and most of them frayed. He expected a new
+one about Christmas; no hurry.
+
+From that window, across the back yard, we saw Johnny McComas, in a
+bright new red tie, busy at his own window. I waved my hand, and he
+waved back. Raymond looked at him, but made no special sign. Johnny was
+packing up his specimens and his postage-stamps, preparatory to the
+family hegira, though neither of us knew.
+
+
+VI
+
+Raymond, who might have asked for almost anything, asked for nothing.
+Johnny, who was in position to ask for next to nothing, asked for almost
+everything. He was constantly teasing his parents, so far as my
+observation went; and his teasing was a form of criticism. "You are not
+doing the right thing by me"--such might have seemed his plaint. He was
+beginning to spread, to reach out: acquisitiveness and assimilativeness
+were to be his two watchwords. He hankered after the externalities; he
+wanted "things." If it was only a new stamp-album, he wanted it hard,
+and he said so. I shall not go so far as to say that he hectored his
+parents into sending him to our school. They were probably feeling, on
+their own account, that they had come to town for better things than
+they had been getting; and likely enough they met his demands halfway.
+There was usually a certain element of cheeriness in his nagging; but
+the cheeriness was quite secondary to the insistence.
+
+"Oh, come, mother!" or, "Oh, father, now!" was commonly Johnny's opening
+formula, employed with a smile, wheedling or protesting, as the occasion
+seemed to require.
+
+And, "Oh, well...!" was commonly the opening formula for the
+response--meaning, in completed form, "Well, if we must, we must."
+
+However, his parents were probably ready to meet with an open mind the
+scorings of their young, sole critic, thinking that his urgency might
+advance themselves no less than him. Well, in the autumn Johnny turned
+up at the Academy with an equipment that included everything approved
+and needed; and he was not long in letting us know that his father was
+manager in the supply-yard of a large firm of contractors and builders.
+His father had spent his earlier married years, it transpired, about the
+grounds of a small-town "depot," and knew a good deal in regard to
+lumber and cement.
+
+To most of us fathers were fathers and businesses were
+businesses--things to be accepted without comment or criticism. Our own
+youthfulness, and the social tone of the day and region, discouraged
+either. If I thought anything about it, I must have thought, as I think
+still, that it was a manly and satisfying matter to come to grips with
+the serviceable actualities of the building trades. Construction, in its
+various phases, still seems to me a more useful and more tonic concern
+than brokerage, for example, and similar forms of office life.
+
+Johnny soon suggested that I go with him, some Saturday afternoon, to
+the "yard." I asked Raymond to join us. Raymond had just come on Gothic
+architecture and was studying its historical phases. He was picking up
+points about the English cathedrals and was making drawings to
+illustrate the development of buttresses and of window tracery. The yard
+was only a mile and a half away and the three of us frolicked loosely
+along the streets until we got there. Johnny's father was going about
+the place in an admirable pair of new blue overalls, and carried a
+thick, blunt pencil behind one ear. He showed an independent, breezy
+manner that had not been very marked before. He was loud and clear and
+authoritative, and kept a dozen or more stout fellows pretty busy. Once
+an elderly man in a high silk hat passed through the yard on his way to
+its little office. He stopped, and he and Johnny's father had some talk
+together. "Yes, sir!" said Johnny's father, with considerable emphasis
+and momentum. I enjoyed his "Yes, sir!" It was pleasant to find him so
+hearty and so well-mannered. He seemed to have escaped from something
+and to be glad of it. The man in the high hat hardly tried to stand up
+against him. As he turned away he smiled in a curious fashion; and I
+thought I heard him say to himself, as he moved back toward the door of
+the shed that had the sign "Office" on it: "I wonder whether I'm going
+to run him, or whether he's going to run me?"
+
+Johnny was all eyes for a tall stack of lathing in bundles and for a
+pile of sacks filled with hair from cows' hides, which last was to go
+into plaster. Raymond looked at these objects of interest--and at
+several others--with some degree of abstractedness. The English
+cathedrals, as I was told later, had not been plastered. Raymond had
+already developed some faculty for entertaining a concept freed from
+clogging and qualifying detail; and this faculty grew as he grew. He
+liked his ideal _net_; facts, practical facts, never had much charm for
+him. I remember his once saying, when about twenty-three, that he should
+have liked to be an architect, but that plumbing and speaking-tubes had
+turned him away. If he could have drawn facades and stopped there, I
+think he might have been quite happy and successful in the profession.
+
+Johnny pulled a lath for each of us out of one of the bundles, and we
+used them in our tour of the yard as alpenstocks. We found a glacier in
+the shape of a mortar bed and were using the laths to sound its depths,
+when Johnny's father appeared from round the corner of a lumber pile. He
+clapped his hands with a loud report.
+
+"Here! that won't do!" he said; and none of us thought it remotely
+possible to withstand him. "Enough for one morning," he added, and he
+waved both arms with a broad scoop to motion us toward the street gate.
+
+"Oh, father, now!" began Johnny (with no smile at all), conscious of his
+position as host.
+
+"No more, to-day," said his father. "School six days a week would be
+about my idea."
+
+Raymond said nothing, but drew up his mouth to one side and himself led
+us toward the street.
+
+
+VII
+
+I would not seem to stress either the saliency or the significance of
+these incidents. I simply put them down, after many years, just as they
+return to my memory. Memory is sporadic; memory is capricious; memory is
+inconsequent, sometimes forgetting the large thing to record the little.
+And memory may again prove itself all these, and more, if I attempt to
+rescue from the past a children's party.
+
+It was my young sister who "gave" it, as our expression was; parents in
+the background, providing the funds and engineering the mechanism, were
+not allowed greatly to count. The party was given for my sister's
+visitor, a little girl from some small interior town whose name (whether
+child's or town's) I have long since forgotten. Raymond was invited, of
+course;--"though he isn't very nice to us," as my sister ruefully
+observed; and some prompting toward fair play (as I vaguely termed it to
+myself) made me suggest Johnny McComas. He came.
+
+There must have been some twenty-five of us--all that our small house
+would hold. There were more games than dances; and the games were
+largely "kissing" games: "post-office," "clap-in, clap-out," "drop the
+handkerchief," and such-like innocent infantilities. Some of us thought
+ourselves too old for this sort of thing, and would willingly have left
+it to the younger children; but the eager lady from next door, who was
+"helping," insisted that we all take part. This is the place for the
+Gertrudes and the Adeles, and they were there in good measure, be-bowed
+and be-sashed and fluttering about (or romping about) flushed and happy.
+And this would be pre-eminently the place for Elsie, Jehiel's
+granddaughter and Raymond's cousin. Elsie would naturally be, in the
+general scheme, my childhood sweetheart; later, my fiancee; and
+ultimately my wife. Such a relationship would help me, of course, to
+keep tab more easily on Raymond during the long course of his life. For
+instance, at this very party I see her doing a polka with Johnny
+McComas, while Raymond (who had been sent to dancing-school, but had
+steadfastly refused to "learn") views Johnny with a mixture of envy and
+contempt. A year or two later, I see Elsie seated in the twilight at the
+head of her grandfather's grandiose front steps, surrounded by boys of
+seventeen or eighteen, while Raymond, sent on some errand to his
+grandfather's house, picks his way through the crowd to say to himself,
+censoriously, in the vestibule: "Well, if I can't talk any better at
+that age than they do...!" Yes, Elsie would undeniably have been an
+aid; but she never existed, and we must dispense with her for once and
+for all.
+
+Raymond could always make himself difficult, and he usually did so at
+parties. To be difficult was to be choice, and to be choice was to be
+desirable. Therefore he got more of the kisses than he might have got
+otherwise--many more, in fact, than he cared for. But on this occasion a
+good part of his talent for making himself difficult was reserved until
+refreshment time. Most of the boys and girls had paired instinctively to
+make a prompt raid on the dining-room table, with Johnny McComas
+unabashedly to the fore; but Raymond lingered behind. My mother
+presently found him moping alone in the parlor, where he was looking
+with an over-emphatic care at the pictures.
+
+"Why, Raymond dear! Why aren't you out with the others? Don't you want
+anything to eat?"
+
+No; Raymond didn't want anything.
+
+"But you do--of course you do. Come."
+
+Then Raymond, thus urged and escorted,--and, above all,
+individualized,--allowed himself to be led out to the refreshments; and,
+to do him justice, he ate as much and as happily as any one else. Johnny
+McComas, with his mouth full, and with Gertrudes and Adeles all around
+him, welcomed him with the high sign of jovial _camaraderie_.
+
+Yes, Johnny took his full share of the ice-cream and macaroons; he got
+his full quota of letters from the "post-office"; the handkerchief was
+dropped behind him every third or fourth time, and he always caught the
+attentive little girl who was whisking away--if he wanted to. He even
+took a manful part in the dancing.
+
+"What a good schottische!" exclaimed one of the Adeles, as the
+industrious lady from next door, after a final bang, withdrew her hands
+from the keyboard. "And how well you dance!"
+
+"Gee!" exclaimed Johnny, with his most open-faced smile; "is that what
+you call it--a schottische? I never tried it before in my life!"
+
+"Learn by doing"--such might have been the motto of the town in those
+early, untutored days. And Johnny McComas emphatically made this motto
+his own.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+I
+
+
+Raymond went into the bank; not in due course, but rather more than a
+year later. After seeing some of his more advanced schoolfellows depart
+for Eastern colleges, after indulging a year of desultory study at home,
+and after passing a summer and autumn among the Wisconsin lakes, he was
+formally claimed by Finance. There was no Franciscan ardor to clasp her
+close, as others have clasped Poverty and Obedience. He began his
+business career, as men have been recommended to begin their matrimonial
+career, with a slight aversion. However, his aversion never brought him
+any future good.
+
+His year at home, so far as I could make out, was taken up largely with
+aesthetics and music. He read the "Seven Lamps of Architecture" and they
+lighted him along a road that led far, far from the constructional
+practicalities of the yard where we had spent a Saturday forenoon, some
+five years before. He had begun to collect books on the brickwork of
+Piacenza and Cremona, and these too led him farther along the general
+path of aestheticism. During our years at the Academy the town, after an
+unprecedentedly thorough sweep by fire, had been rebuilding itself; and
+on more than one Saturday forenoon of that period we had tramped
+together through the devastated district, rejoicing in the restorative
+activities on every hand and honestly admiring the fantasies and
+ingenuities of the "architects" of the day. But Raymond had now emerged
+from that innocent stage; summoning forth from some interior reservoir
+of taste an inspirational code of his own, he condemned these crudities
+and aberrations as severely as they probably deserved, and cultivated a
+confident belief that somewhere or other he was to find things which
+should square better with his likings and should respond more kindly to
+his mounting sensibilities.
+
+"Not going to cut us?" I once asked. "Just as we're picking up, too?"
+
+But Raymond looked abstractedly into the distance and undertook no
+definite reply. Possibly he had responded to Ruskin; more probably to
+some divine young sense of truth and fitness such as forms the natural
+endowment, by no means uncommon, of right-minded youth. Or it may be
+that he had simply reached the "critical" age, when Idealism calls the
+Daily Practicalities to its bar and delivers its harsh, imperious
+judgments; when it puts the world, if but for a few brief months, "where
+it belongs." His natural tendency toward generalization helped him
+here--helped, perhaps, too much. He passed judgment not only on his
+parents, whom he had been finding very unsatisfactory, and on most of
+his associates (myself, for example, whenever I happened to speak an
+appreciative word for his essentially admirable father), but on the
+community as such. A filmy visitant from Elsewhere had grazed his
+forehead and whispered in his ear that the town allotted to him by
+destiny was crude, alike in its deficiencies and in its affirmations,
+and that complete satisfaction for him lay altogether in another and
+riper quarter.
+
+Perhaps it was some such discontent as this that led him in the
+direction of musical composition--or toward attempts at it. He had no
+adequate preparation for it, nor, so far as I could perceive, any
+justificatory call. He had once taken a few terms on the piano; and he
+had on his shelves a few elementary works on harmony; and he had in his
+fingertips a certain limited knack for improvisation; and he had once
+sketched out, rather haltingly, a few simple songs. Yet, all the same,
+another reservoir, one of uncertain depth and capacity, was opening up
+for him at an age when opening-up was the continuing and dominating
+feature of one's days--a muse was stirring the vibrant air about him;
+and I gathered, after two or three certain visits to his house, that he
+had embarked on some composition or other of an ambitious and
+comprehensive nature: a cantata, possibly, or even some higher flight.
+As he had never domesticated musical theory and musical notation in his
+brain, most of his composing had to be carried on at the keyboard
+itself. The big piano in the big open drawing-room resounded with his
+strumming experiments in melody and harmony--sounds intelligible, often
+enough, to no ears but his own, and not always agreeable to them. I am
+sure he tried his parents' patience cruelly. His reiterated phrases and
+harmonizings were audible throughout a good part of the house. They did
+nothing toward relieving his mother's headaches, nothing toward raising
+his father's hopes that, pretty soon, he would come to grips with the
+elements of Loans and Discounts. Even the servants, setting the table,
+now and again closed the dining-room door.
+
+"Oh, Raymond, Raymond; _not_ to-day!" his mother would sometimes plead.
+
+I presume that, during this period, the diary was still going on; and no
+one with such a gift for writing will stop short at a diary. In fact,
+Raymond tried his hand at a few short stories--still another muse was
+fluttering about his temples. Most of these stories came back; but a few
+of them got printed obscurely in mangled form, and the failure of the
+venturesome periodicals sometimes deprived him of the honorarium (as
+pay was then pompously called) which would have given the last
+convincing touch to his claims on authorship. He spoke of these stories
+freely enough to me, but disclaimed all attempts at poetry: short of
+that field, I believe, he really did stay his hand.
+
+Well, perhaps too many good fairies--good only to the pitch of
+velleity--buzzed and brushed, like muses, or pseudo-muses, about his
+brows. All this unsettled him--and sometimes annoyed his daily
+associates. But how, without these instinctive young passes at Art,
+could the unceasing, glamorous and needful rebirth of the world get
+itself accomplished?
+
+
+II
+
+As for Johnny McComas, he found one year of our Academy enough. It was
+the getting in, not the staying in, that provoked his young powers. Our
+school, moreover, was explicitly classical in a day when the old
+classical ideal still ruled respected everywhere; and Johnny, much as he
+liked being with us and of us, could not see the world in terms of
+Latin paradigms. He wanted to be "doing something"; he wanted to be "in
+business." During the summer following his year at Dr. Grant's I heard
+of him as somebody's office-boy somewhere downtown, and then quite lost
+sight of him for the five years that succeeded.
+
+It occurred to me that Johnny must be doing just the right thing for
+himself; he would make the sort of office-boy that "business men" would
+contend for: easy to imagine the manoeuvres, even the feuds, that
+would enliven business blocks in the downtown district for the
+possession of Johnny's confident smile and dashing, forthright way. I
+learned, in due season, that Johnny had cast in his lot with a
+real-estate operator, and had been cherished, through periods harried by
+competition, as a pearl of price.
+
+The city was emphatically still in the "real-estate" stage. Anybody
+arriving without profession or training straightway began to sell lots.
+Nothing lay more openly abundant than land; the town had but to
+propagate itself automatically over the wide prairies. The wild flowers
+waved only to welcome the surveyor's gang; and new home-seekers--in the
+jargon of the trade--were ever hurrying to rasp themselves upon the
+ragged edges of the outskirts.
+
+One Sunday morning in May, Raymond and I determined on an excursion to
+the country--or, at all events, to some of the remoter suburbs. The bank
+would not claim his thoughts for twenty-four hours, nor the law-school
+mine. We left the train at a promising point and prepared to scuffle
+over a half-mile splotched with vervain and yarrow, yet to bloom, toward
+a long, thin range of trees that seemed to mark the course of some small
+stream. But between us and that possible stream there soon developed
+much besides the sprinkling of prairie flowers. We began to notice
+rough-ploughed strips of land that seemed to mean streets for some new
+subdivision; piles of lumber, here and there, which should serve to
+realize the ideals of the "home-seekers"; and presently a gay,
+improvised little shack with a disproportionate sign to blazon the
+hopes and ambitions of a well-known firm back in town. And in the
+doorway of the shack stood Johnny McComas.
+
+He was as ruddy as ever, and his blue eyes were a bit sharper. He was
+slightly heavier than either of us, but no taller. He knew us as quickly
+as we knew him. For some reason he did not seem particularly glad to see
+us. He made the reason clear at once.
+
+"They had me out here last Sunday," he said, looking about his chaotic
+domain disparagingly, "and they say they may have to have me out here
+next Sunday--somebody's sick or missing. But they won't," he continued
+darkly. It was a threat, we felt--a threat that would make some
+presumptuous superior cower and conform. "I really belong at our branch
+in Dellwood Park, where there _is_ something; not out here, beyond the
+last of everything." And he said more to indicate that his energies and
+abilities were temporarily going to waste.
+
+But having put himself right in his own eyes and in ours, he began to
+give rein to his fundamental good nature. Emerging from the cloud that
+was just now darkening his merits and his future, he asked, interestedly
+enough, what we ourselves were doing.
+
+I had to confess that I was still a student. Raymond mentioned briefly
+and reluctantly the bank. It was nothing to him that he, no less than
+Johnny, was now a man on a salary.
+
+"Bank, eh?" said Johnny. "That's good. We're thinking of starting a bank
+next year at our Dellwood branch. It's far enough in, and it's far
+enough out. Plenty of good little businesses all around there. And I'm
+going to make them let me have a hand in managing it."
+
+This warm ray of hope from the immediate future quite illumined Johnny.
+He told us genially about the prospects of the venture in the midst of
+which he was encamped, and ended by feigning us as a young bridal couple
+that had come out to look for a "home."
+
+"There may be one or two along pretty soon, if the day holds fair; so I
+might as well keep myself in practice." Then he jocularly let himself
+loose on transportation, and part payments down, and street
+improvements "in," and healthful country air for young children. He was
+very fluent and somewhat cynical, and turned the seamy side of his trade
+a little too clearly to view.
+
+He explained how the spring had been exceptionally wet in that
+region,--"which, after all, _is_ low," he acknowledged,--and how his
+firm, by digging a few trenches in well-considered directions, had
+drained all its standing water to adjoining acres still lower, the
+property of a prospective rival. Recalling this smart trick made Johnny
+think better of the people who would maroon him for a succession of
+Sundays, and he became more genially communicative still.
+
+"That gray streak off to the west--if you can see it--is our water
+drying up. Better be drying there than here. You can put a solid foot on
+every yard of our ground to-day. Come along with me and I'll show you
+your cottage--_domus, a, um_. Not quite right? Well, no great matter."
+
+He pointed toward a yellow pile of two-by-fours, siding, and shingles.
+"Be sure you make your last payment before you find yourselves warped
+out of shape."
+
+We followed. Johnny seemed much more expert and worldly-wise than either
+of us. We held our innocent excursion in abeyance and bowed with a
+certain embarrassed awe to Johnny's demonstration of his aptitude for
+taking the world as it was and to his light-handed, care-free way of
+handling so serious a matter, to most men, as the founding of a home. As
+we continued our jaunt, I began to feel that I now liked Johnny a little
+less than I could have wished.
+
+
+III
+
+At about this time Raymond and I found ourselves members of a little
+circle that expressed itself chiefly through choral music. It was almost
+a neighborhood circle, and almost a self-made circle--it gradually
+evolved itself, with no special guidance or intention, until, finally,
+there it was. I, at that period, may have felt that it would verge on
+the presumptuous to pick and choose--to attempt consciously the
+fabrication of a social environment--and so I adopted with docility the
+one which presented itself. Raymond, on the other hand, may have felt
+that even the best which was available was unlikely to be good enough
+and have accepted fatalistically anything which could possibly be made
+to do.
+
+Just why our little group of a dozen or so should have united on a
+musical basis and have expressed itself in a weekly "sing" I might find
+it hard to explain. None of us fellows was especially blessed with a
+voice; and the various Gertrudes and Adeles that met with us were
+assuredly without any marked sanction to vocalize. Possibly the "sing"
+was the mere outcome of youthful exuberance and of the tendency of young
+and eager molecules to crystallize into what came, later, to be termed a
+"bunch."
+
+As for Raymond himself, he never sang at all. "Oh, come, Rayme; join
+in!" the other fellows would suggest--and suggest in vain.
+
+"I'm doing _my_ part," he would return, giving the piano-stool a nearer
+hitch to the keyboard.
+
+In fact, it was his specific function to preside at the Chickering, the
+Weber, the Steinway, according to the facilities offered by the
+particular home--for we moved about in rotation. This service, which we
+presently came to consider sufficient in itself, dispensed him from
+exhibiting his nature in so articulate a thing as actual vocal
+utterance. This he was quite opposed to: he would never even try a hymn
+in church. But he could accompany; he could improvise; he could
+modulate; he could transpose any simple air. The ease and readiness with
+which he did all this made less obvious--indeed, almost
+imperceptible--his fundamental unwillingness to abandon himself before
+others (especially if members of his own circle) to any manifestation
+that might be taxed with even a remote emotionalism. And yet, at that
+very time, he was laying the foundations of a claim to be that broad and
+vague thing called an "artist." Even as early as this, apparently, he
+was troubled by two contradictory impulses: he wanted to be an artist
+and give himself out; and he wanted to be a gentleman and hold himself
+in. An entangling, ruinous paradox.
+
+This comment on Raymond's musical inclinations and musical services may
+require a bit of shading: I believe that, after all, he never quite
+cared for music unless he had, in all literalness, his "hand" in it. He
+never liked to hear any one else play the piano, still less the violin;
+concerts of all sorts were likely to bore him; and he never really rose
+to an understanding of the more recondite and elaborate musical forms:
+to have his fingers on the keyboard--especially when improvising in a
+secure inarticulateness--was his great desideratum.
+
+In our little group we ran from seventeen to nineteen; some of us just
+finishing high school, others just on the edge of college, others (like
+myself) engaged in professional studies, and still others making a debut
+in business as clerks. We sang mostly the innocent old songs, American
+or English, of an earlier day, and sometimes the decorous numbers from
+the self-respecting operetta recently established in London. No
+contributions from a new and dubious foreign element had yet come to
+cheapen our taste, to disturb our nervous systems, or to throw upon the
+negro, the Hawaiian, or the Argentine the onus of a crass passion that
+one was more desirous of expressing than of acknowledging. No; there was
+assuredly no excess of emotional life--whether good or bad--in the body
+of music we favored. Perhaps what our little circle really desired was
+simply good-fellowship and a high degree of harmonious clamor. Certainly
+all our doings, whether on Friday evening, or on the other forenoons,
+afternoons, and evenings of the week, were quite devoid of an
+embarrassing sex-consciousness. We "trained together," as the expression
+went--all the fellows and all the Gertrudes and Adeles--with no sense of
+_malaise_, and postponing, or setting aside, in the miraculous American
+fashion, all sexual considerations whatsoever.
+
+I hardly know just why I should have thought that Johnny McComas could
+be introduced successfully into this circle. Johnny, as he had told us
+in his suburb, had cut loose from his parents. He was now living on his
+own, in a neighborhood not far from ours--from his, as it had once been.
+One evening I ventured to bring him round. He developed an obstreperous
+baritone--it was the same voice, now more specifically in action, that I
+had first heard on the devastated prairie; and he made himself rather
+preponderant, whether he happened to know the song or not.
+
+"Why, you're quite an addition!" commented one of the girls, in
+surprise--almost in consternation.
+
+"He is, indeed,--if he doesn't drown us all out!" muttered one of the
+fellows, behind his back.
+
+Yes, Johnny was vociferous--so long as the singing went on. But he
+developed, besides an obstreperous voice, an obstreperous interest in
+one of our Adeles--a piercing soprano who was our mainstay; and he
+showed some tendency to defeat the occasion by segregating her in a bay
+window. Segregation was the last of our aims, and Johnny did not quite
+please. Furthermore, Johnny seemed to feel himself among a lot of boys
+who were yet to make their "start," overlooking the fact that Raymond
+was in the bank, and ignorant of the further fact that one of our
+fellows was just beginning to be a salesman in a bond house. Johnny
+became violently communicative about the attractions of Dellwood Park
+and seemed to want to figure demonstratively in the eyes of Gertrude and
+Adele as an up-and-coming paladin of the business world. To most of us
+he seemed too self-assertive, too self-assured. He knew too clearly what
+he wanted, and showed it too clearly. Indeed it became apparent to me
+that while a boy of twelve may be accepted easily (at least in an early,
+simple society), a youth of eighteen cannot altogether escape the issues
+of caste. It was borne in on me presently that Johnny might as well have
+remained away. In fact--
+
+"We shan't need him again," said the brother of the soprano to me, as
+the evening broke up.
+
+And Raymond himself remarked to me a day later:--
+
+"Don't push him; he'll get along without your help."
+
+
+IV
+
+While the rankness of new elements in a new era had not penetrated our
+homes, it had begun to make itself manifest in public places. The town,
+within sixty years, had risen from a population of nearly _nil_ to a
+population of some five or six hundred thousand; and it was only in due
+course, perhaps, that "vice" now raised its head and that a "criminal
+class" came into effective, unabashed functioning. It was to be many
+years before the better elements learned how to combine for an efficient
+opposition to impudent evils. A heterogeneous populace, newly arrived,
+was still willing to elect mayors of native blood; but one of these,
+elected and reelected to the town's lasting harm, might as well have
+been of the newer, and wholly exterior, tradition: a genial,
+loose-lipped demagogue who saw an opportunity to weld the miscellany of
+discrepant elements into a compact engine for the furtherance of his own
+coarse ambitions, and who allowed his supporters such a measure of
+license as was needed to make their support continuing. A shameless new
+quarter suddenly obtruded itself with an ugly emphasis; unclassifiables,
+male and female, began to assert and disport themselves more daringly
+than dreamt of heretofore; and many good citizens who would crowd the
+town forward to a population of a million and to a status undeniably
+metropolitan came to stroll these tawdry, noisy new streets with a
+curiosity of mind at once disturbed, titillated, and somehow gratified.
+Said some: "This is a new thing; do we quite like it?" Said others: "The
+town is certainly moving ahead; we don't know but that we do."
+
+Yes, a good many social observers set forth to see for themselves the
+new phenomena and to appraise the value of them in the coming political
+and social life of the community. Of course, many of these observers
+were too young and heedless to draw inferences from the sudden flood of
+new bars and bright lights and crass tunes and youthful creatures in
+short skirts who seemed not quite to know whether their proper element
+was the stage above or the range of tables below; in fact, these
+observers waived all attempt at speculative thought and became
+participants.
+
+Raymond and I had heard comments on the new developments from our
+elders; we were not without our own curiosity (though we had enough
+fastidiousness not to graze things very close, still less to wade into
+them very deep), and we decided one evening that we would look into two
+or three of these new and notable places of public entertainment.
+
+The first of them offered little. The second of them developed Johnny
+McComas. He sat at a table, talking too familiarly, or at least too
+forbearingly, with a rubicund, hard-faced man in shirt-sleeves standing
+at his elbow--probably the head of the place, or his first aide; and he
+was buying obviously unnecessary glasses of things for two of the young
+creatures in short skirts--Gertrudes and Adeles of that particular
+stratum, or Katies and Maggies, if preferred. Johnny sat there happy
+enough: an early example of the young business warrior diverting himself
+after the fray. Years afterward the scene came back to me when I met
+with a showy painting in the resonant new lobby of one of the greater
+hotels. It showed a terrace overlooking some placid Greek sea; the happy
+warrior standing ungirt and uncasqued, with a beautiful maiden of
+indeterminate status seated beside him; a graceful attendant holding a
+wreath above each happy and prosperous head, and a group of sandaled
+dancing-girls lightly footing it for the pleasure of the fortunate pair;
+the whole scene illuminated by the supreme, smiling self-satisfaction of
+the relaxed soldier amid the pipings of peace. So Johnny; he had earned
+the money and won the right to spend it in pleasure; his, too, the duty
+of refreshing himself for the strenuous morrow.
+
+He saw us and nodded. "Life!"--that was what he seemed to say. He made a
+feint to interest us in his companions; but they were poor things, as we
+knew, and as he must have known too. He left them without much regret
+and without much ceremony, and took us on to the next place.
+
+"It's life, isn't it?" he said in so many words.
+
+Raymond's nose went up disdainfully. "Life!" Some such manifestations,
+if properly handled and framed, might be life in Paris, perhaps; but he
+could not accept them as life here at home, within a mile or two of his
+own study. What this evening offered him seemed to require a
+considerable touch of refining before it could reach acceptance. It was
+all only an imperfectly specious substitute for life, only a coarse
+parody on life. The town, he told me the next day, made him think of a
+pumpkin: it was big and sudden and coarse-textured. "I've had enough of
+it," he added; "I want something different, and something a lot better."
+
+Johnny, as I say, took us to the next place; we might not have known how
+to take ourselves there. Johnny honestly liked the glare, the noise, the
+uproarious music, and the human press both on the sidewalks and in the
+packed, panting interiors. I liked it all, too,--for once in a way; but
+I soon saw that, for Raymond, even once in a way was once too often. In
+this last place a girl with a hand too familiarly laid on his arm gave
+the finishing touch; it was a coarse, dingy little hand, with some
+tawdry rings. Raymond never liked close quarters; neither in those days,
+nor ever after, did he care to come decisively to grips with actual
+life. "Keep off!" was what his look said to the offender. The poor,
+puzzled little debutante quickly stepped back, and we all regained the
+street. Raymond was trembling with embarrassment and vexation.
+
+"Why, you were making a hit," said Johnny.
+
+"Let's get home," said Raymond to me, ignoring Johnny. "This is enough,
+and more than enough. What a hole this town is coming to be!"
+
+
+V
+
+Raymond stayed on at the bank, though--if one might judge by his words
+and actions--with no enthusiasm in the present and no hopefulness for
+the future. He did what he had to do, and did it fairly well; but there
+was no sign that he was looking forward, and there remained scant
+likelihood that he would meet the expectations of his father and
+grandfather by mastering the business. On the contrary, I think he
+actually set his face against it: he seemed as resolute not to learn
+banking as he had been resolute not to learn dancing. Professor Baltique
+and the little girls in light-soled shoes and bright-colored sashes had
+given him up in the waltz; and it looked as if James B. Prince must
+presently renounce all hope of his ever learning how to turn the
+collective spare cash of many depositors to profit. I recall the day
+when the chief little light of the dancing-class, after some moments of
+completely static tramplings by Raymond in the midst of the floor,
+suddenly began to pout and to frown, and then left him in the midst of
+the dance and of the company and came to tears before she could reach an
+elder sister by the side wall. Raymond accepted the incident without
+comment. If his demeanor expressed anything, it expressed his
+satisfaction at carrying a point.
+
+But he did not wait until a vexed and disappointed bank left him high
+and dry. Though he must have known that many young clerks in the office
+envied him his billet and that many young fellows outside it would have
+been glad to get in on any terms whatever, he never gave a sign that he
+valued his opportunity; and when he finally pulled out it was with no
+regard to any possible successor.
+
+The younger men in the bank were a rather trim lot, and were expected to
+be. They did wonders, in the way of dressing, on their sixty or
+seventy-five dollars a month. Raymond's own dressing, for some little
+time past, had grown somewhat slack and careless. I did him the
+injustice of supposing that he felt himself to be himself, and _hors
+concours_ so far as the general body of clerklings was concerned; but he
+had other reasons.
+
+He had given up buying books and periodicals; no new volumes to be seen
+in his room except works of travel (preferably guide-books) and grammars
+and dictionaries of foreign languages. For all such works of general
+uplift and inspiration as the intending tourist in Europe might expect
+to profit by, he depended on circulating libraries or the shelves of
+friends. I myself lent him a book of travels in the Dolomites, and
+scarcely know, now, whether I did well or ill. Raymond, in short, was
+silently, doggedly saving, with the intention of taking a trip--or of
+making a sojourn--abroad.
+
+The cleavage came in James Prince's front parlor, one Sunday afternoon,
+and I happened to be present. A very few words sufficed. Raymond's
+father had picked up a thick little book from the centre-table, the only
+book in the room, and was looking back and forth between this work--an
+Italian dictionary--and Raymond himself.
+
+"What do you expect to get out of this?" he asked.
+
+"I expect to learn some Italian," Raymond replied.
+
+"Wouldn't French be more useful?"
+
+"I know all the French I need."
+
+"Where do you expect to use your Italian?"
+
+"In Italy. I didn't go to college."
+
+Impossible to depict the quality of Raymond's tone in speaking these
+five words. There was no color, no emphasis, no seeming presentation of
+a case. It was the cool, level statement of a fact; nor did he try to
+make the fact too pertinent, too cogent. An hour-long oration would not
+have been more effective. He had calmly taken off a lid and had
+permitted a look within. His father saw--saw that whatever Raymond, by
+plus or by minus, might be, he was no longer a boy.
+
+"I know," said James Prince, slowly. He was looking past us both and was
+opening and shutting the covers of the book unconsciously.
+
+A day or two later, Raymond gave me the rest. His father had asked him
+how much money he had. Out of his sixty or seventy-five a month Raymond
+had set aside several hundreds; "and I said I could make the rest by
+corresponding for some newspaper," he continued. This was in the simple
+day when travel-letters from Europe were still printed and read in the
+newspapers, and even "remunerated" by editors. Incredible, perhaps, in
+this day; yet true for that.
+
+His father had asked him how long he intended to be away. Raymond was
+non-committal. He might travel for a year, or he might try "living" there
+for a while--a long while. A matter of funds and of luck, it seemed. His
+father, without pressing him closely, offered to double whatever sum he
+had saved up. He appeared neither pleased nor displeased by Raymond's
+course. He felt I suppose, that the bank would hardly suffer, and that
+Raymond (whom he did not understand) might get some profit. Fathers have
+their own opinions of sons, which opinions range, I dare say, all the
+way from charitableness to desperation. In the case of my own son, I am
+glad to say, a very slight degree of charitableness was all the tax laid
+upon me. There were some distressing months of angularity, both in
+physique and in manners, at seventeen; then a quick and miraculous
+escape into trimness and grace. And my grandson, now at nine, promises
+to be, I am glad to state, even more of a success and a pleasure. As for
+Raymond, he had developed unevenly: his growth had gone athwart.
+Possibly the "world," that vast, vague entity of which his father's
+knowledge was restricted almost to one narrow field, might aid in
+straightening the boy out.
+
+"Well, try it for a year," his father said, not unkindly, and almost
+wistfully.
+
+
+VI
+
+When Johnny McComas heard of Raymond's resolve, he drew up his round
+face into a grimace. He thought the step queer, and he said so. But,
+"Oh, well, if a fellow can afford it!" he added. And he did not explain
+just what meaning he attached to the word "afford."
+
+But Johnny could see no valid reason for a fellow's giving the town the
+go-by at nineteen and at just that stage of the town's development.
+Johnny was so made that the community which housed him was necessarily
+the centre of the cosmos; he himself, howsoever placed, was necessarily
+at the centre of the circle--so why leave the central dot for some vague
+situation on the circumference? And take this particular town: what a
+present! what a future! what a wide extension over the limitless prairie
+with every passing month!--a prairie which merely needed to be cut up
+into small checkers and sold to hopeful newcomers; a prairie which
+produced profits as freely as it produced goldenrod and asters; a
+prairie upon which home-seekers might settle down under agents whose
+wide range, running from helpful cooeperation to absolute flimflam, need
+leave no competent "operator" other than rich.
+
+"What are you going to get out of it?" asked Johnny earnestly.
+
+Raymond attempted no set reply. Johnny, he recognized, was out for
+positive results, for tangible returns; his idea was to get on in the
+world by definite and unmistakable stages. Raymond never welcomed the
+idea of "getting on"--not at least in the sense in which his own day and
+place used the expression. To do so was but to acknowledge some early
+inferiority. Raymond was not conscious of any inferiority to be
+overcome. Johnny might, of course, on this particular point, feel as he
+chose.
+
+About this time old Jehiel Prince began to come more frequently to his
+son's house. He was yellower and grayer, and he was getting testy and
+irascible. He sometimes brought his lawyer with him, and the pair made
+James Prince an active participant in their concerns. However, Jehiel
+was perhaps less unhappy here than in his own home. When there, he sat
+moodily alone, of evenings, in his basement office; and Raymond, who was
+sometimes sent over with documents or with messages, impatiently
+reported him to me as "glum."
+
+"Poor old fellow! he doesn't know how to live!" said Raymond in
+complacent pity. He himself, of course, had but to assemble all the
+bright-hued elements that awaited him a few months ahead to make his own
+life a poem, a song.
+
+"I can do that," he once said, in a moment when exaltation had briefly
+made him confidential.
+
+Raymond never saw his grandmother--at least he never cared to see her.
+Here, if nowhere else, he was willing to take a cue, and he took it from
+the head of the family. He thought that so many years of town life might
+have made her a little less rustic in the end: the York State of 1835 or
+of 1840 need not have remained York State so immitigably. And if there
+was a domestic blight on the house he was willing to believe that she
+was two thirds to blame: behind the old soul was a pack of poor
+relations. Particularly a brother-in-law--a bilious, cadaverous fellow,
+whom I saw once, and once was enough. He had been an itinerant preacher
+farther East, and he lived in a woeful little cottage along one of
+Jehiel's horse-car routes. His mournful-eyed wife was always asking
+help. He too had "gone into real-estate," and unsuccessfully. He was the
+dull reverse of that victorious obverse upon which Johnny McComas was
+beginning to shine.
+
+Another of her relatives, a niece, had married a small-town sharper. He
+had brought her to the larger town, and his sharpness had taken on a
+keener edge. He, too, had gone into real-estate--a lean, wiry little
+man, incredibly arid and energetic, and carrying a preposterously large
+mustache. There was trouble with him after Jehiel's death. It developed
+that one of the documents which old Beulah Prince had been cajoled or
+hectored into signing had deeded to him--temporarily and for a specific
+purpose--some forty acres of purple and yellow prairie flowers,
+delightful blossoms nodding and swaying in the wind, and that he had
+refused to deed more than half of them back: his services at that
+particular juncture were "worth something," he said. Well, life (as may
+have been remarked previously) would be quite tolerable without one's
+relatives. Meanwhile the summer flowers bloomed and nodded on, under the
+windy blue sky, all unaware of their disgrace.
+
+A month after Raymond's decision, flowers (of the sort favored in
+cemeteries) were trying to bloom over old Jehiel. Some stroke, some
+lesion, had put a period to the unhappy career of this grim old man.
+Raymond set to one side, for a few weeks, his new trunk and portmanteau;
+for a few weeks only--he had no notion of making, ultimately, any great
+change in his plans. It was obvious that James Prince was looking
+forward to a year or two of harassing procedure in the courts, for old
+Jehiel's estate was unlikely to smooth out with celerity; but Raymond
+was clearly of no use at home, even as a mere source of sympathy. A
+fortnight after his grandfather's funeral he was off.
+
+The singing-class would have given him good-bye in a special session;
+but his eyes were now on brighter matters and the vocalizing Gertrudes
+and Adeles were dim. He got out of it. Besides, the affair might come to
+involve something like ceremony; and he was always desirous of avoiding
+(save in the arts) the ceremonial side of life. When he came back from
+his first sojourn on the Continent he was a young man of mark, as things
+went in our particular town and time; or, rather, he might have been
+such, had he but chosen. The family fortunes were then merely at the
+stage of worry and still far from that of impending disaster. Raymond
+came back with money, position, and a certain aureole of personal
+distinction--just the sort of young man who would be asked to act as
+usher at a wedding. He _was_ asked repeatedly; but he never acted, and
+his excuses and subterfuges for avoiding such a service almost became
+one of the comedies of the day. He had no relish for seeing himself
+walking ceremonially up a church aisle under the eyes of hundreds, and
+I knew better than to ask him to walk up any aisle for me. He never did
+the thing but once, and that was under the inescapable compulsion of his
+fiancee--who, for her part, insisted on eyes and plenty of them. A man
+may never cease to be astonished at the workings of feminine preferences
+on such an occasion, but can hardly escape accommodating himself to
+them. Gertrudes are Gertrudes.
+
+But the wedding is years ahead, while the departure for Europe is
+imminent. Raymond had a tepid, awkward parting with his mother, whose
+headaches would not allow her to go to the train; and he shook hands
+rather coldly and constrainedly with his father, who would have
+welcomed, as I guess, some slight show of filial warmth, and he threw an
+embarrassedly facetious word to me about the weight of his portmanteau,
+and so was off. And it was years, rather than months, before he came
+back.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+I
+
+
+While Raymond was taking his course abroad, Johnny McComas was shaping
+his course at home. A colorless, unbiased statement--as it was meant to
+be; one which, despite the slight difference between "taking" and
+"shaping," has no slant and displays no animus. Colorless, yes; too
+colorless, perhaps you will object. If so, I will reword the matter.
+While Raymond, then, was in Europe cultivating his gentler faculties,
+Johnny remained in America, strengthening certain specific powers. Or,
+again: while Raymond was preparing, or so he thought, for a desirably
+decorative place in the "world" (the world at large), Johnny was
+qualifying himself, as he felt sure, for an important and remunerative
+position in that particular section of the world to which he had decided
+to confine his endeavors. And if you ask me, after I have colored a
+colorless statement, to bias an unbiased one, I shall refuse. I am not
+taking sides. Each of them was following his own likings--not the worst
+of rules for a growing and avid organism.
+
+Raymond wrote, of course,--it was impossible that he should not; and I
+think I showed one or two of his early letters to Johnny. Johnny was not
+exactly interested; vistas were opened for which he had no eyes and
+which possessed no appositeness to his own aims.
+
+"Still over there, eh?" he asked, on my producing a second letter.
+"These are the years that count," he added. He was probably implying
+that the final score would make a better showing for the man who spent
+those years in his native and proper environment.
+
+He disregarded the general drift of the letters, but hit upon one or two
+novel expressions, and repeated them, half-quizzical, half-intrigue.
+
+"Still over there," I echoed. A developing nature, I felt, must reach
+out for whatever it needs; and, in simpler form, I said so.
+
+"Well, I'm no misfit," he rejoined briefly. To "feel at home" at
+home--that, I presume, was the advantage he was asserting.
+
+Johnny, "at home," was not long in outgrowing the opportunities of
+Dellwood Park. Though he did not make, quite yet, the central district,
+a year or two later found him in an older and more important suburb--one
+that had passed the first acuteness of speculation and had pretty well
+settled down to a regulated life. It was not a suburb of the first rank,
+nor even perhaps of the second; but it suited his tastes and his present
+purposes. The new business combined banking and real-estate, and the
+banking department even maintained a small safety-deposit vault. There
+was also some insurance; and a little of mortgage-broking. Johnny was a
+highly prized element in this business and was pleased from the start
+with the outlook.
+
+"A fellow," he said, "can pick up more experience out there in a month
+than he could in one of these big downtown offices in a year."
+
+Nearly two years passed before I was to see him in his new environment.
+There came up a bit of business for a suburban client of mine which
+could as well be settled at Johnny's place as at another. It needed no
+more than a glance to perceive that Johnny was the dominant factor of
+the little institution. His was the biggest roller-top seen through a
+maze of gilt letters on a vast sheet of plate glass by commuters turning
+the corner morning and evening. His, too, chiefly, the deference of
+clerks and office-boy. He was ruddy and robust, and seemed likely to
+impose himself anywhere, when the time came. Thus far, a small Forum,
+perhaps; but he was the Caesar in it. He did not disdain to attend to my
+affair himself; he even showed an emphatic, if not ponderous,
+_bonhomie_.
+
+Just as I was getting up to leave, a man of forty-five or more, with the
+general aspect of a contractor's foreman, put in his head. It was
+Johnny's father.
+
+"I guess you know George Waite," Johnny said to him; "and I guess he
+knows you."
+
+We shook hands, under Johnny's direction, and said that he was right.
+His father's hand--rough and with a broken nail or two--was that of a
+superintendent who on occasion helped with a plank or a mortarboard. He
+had an open face and a pleasant manner; he was not at all the dominant
+personage I remembered meeting in that "yard," years ago. Johnny, it
+seemed, was putting up a row of small houses on the suburb's edge, and
+his father was supervising the job. Johnny was pretty direct in saying
+what he wanted done, or not done, in connection with this work; and if
+his father made a suggestion it was as likely as not to be overruled. He
+was only one of the senators in Johnny's little curia, and probably far
+from the most important of them.
+
+Johnny's father got away, after all, before I did. Johnny asked me to
+stay for a little, and there was not much for a young professional man
+to do after catching the 4.52 into town. We sat for a while talking of
+indifferent matters. Johnny, surrounded by his own prosperity, asked
+with a show of interest, and without condescension, about my progress in
+the law, and I was replying with the cautious vagueness of one whose
+practice is not yet all he hopes it will be. During this time I had
+noticed, through the maze of gilt lettering, a limousine standing just
+round the corner. Its curtains were drawn: "an odd circumstance," I had
+commented inwardly. All of a sudden the street-door of the bank burst
+open, and three masked men, brandishing revolvers, rushed in.
+
+"You cover the cashier!" cried one; "we'll take care of the vault!"
+
+Johnny McComas flung open a drawer, seized a revolver of his own, sprang
+to his feet--
+
+Pardon me, dear reader. The simple fact is, I have suddenly been struck
+by my lack of drama. You see how awkwardly I provide it, when I try.
+What bank robbers, I ask you, would undertake such an adventure at
+half-past four in the afternoon? I cannot compete with the films. As a
+matter of fact, the vault stood locked, the tellers were gone, even the
+office-boy had stolen away, and Johnny and I were left alone together,
+exchanging rather feebly, and with increasing feebleness, some faint and
+unimportant boyhood reminiscences.... I feel abysmally abashed; let us
+open a new section.
+
+
+II
+
+As I have said, Raymond wrote. He wrote, for example, with a voluminous
+duteousness, to his parents. His letters to them, so far as they came to
+my notice, were curious; probably he meant that they should be saved and
+should become a sort of journal of his travels. They were almost
+completely impersonal. There was plenty of straight description; but
+beyond some slight indications of his own movements, past or intended,
+there was no narration. He never mentioned people he met; he never
+described his adventures--if he had any. He seemed to be saying to
+Europe, as Rastignac said to Paris, "_A nous deux, maintenant!_" He was
+at grips with the Old World, and that sufficed.
+
+His letters to me, however, were not devoid of personal reactions. These
+commonly took an aesthetic turn. An early letter from Rome had a good
+deal to say about the Baroque. He met it everywhere; it was an
+abomination; it tried his soul. Fontana and Maderna, the Gog and Magog
+of architecture, had flanked the portals of art and had let through a
+hideous throng of artificialities and corruptions.... The word "Baroque"
+was new to me, and I looked it up. I learned that it described, not a
+current movement, as I had supposed, but an influence which had
+exhausted itself nearly three hundred years ago. But it was still recent
+and real to Raymond. And I learned, further, that this style had modern
+champions who could say a good word for it. In any event, it might be
+accepted calmly as a valuable and characteristic link in the general
+historic chain.
+
+In another letter he was ecstatic over the Gothic brickwork of Cremona.
+It was so beautiful, he said in as many words, that it made his heart
+ache; not often did Raymond let himself go like that. Eager to follow
+his track--and to understand, if possible, his heart, however peculiar
+and baffling--I looked up, in turn, North Italian brickwork. This was
+twice three hundred years old. But it had stirred other modern hearts
+than Raymond's; for an English aesthete had tried (and almost succeeded)
+to impose it on his country as a living mode. "Very well," I said;
+"Italian brickwork may reasonably be accepted as a modern interest."
+
+Raymond, before descending to Italy, had spent some months in Paris.
+Circumstances had enabled him to frequent a few studios, and his first
+letter to me from that city had been rather technical and "viewy."
+Incidentally, he had seen something of the students, and had found
+little to approve, either in their manners or their morals. He left
+Paris without reporting any moral infractions of his own and settled
+down for some stay in Florence. He was studying the language further, he
+reported: a language, he said, which was easy to begin, but hard to
+continue--the longer you studied the less you really knew. However, he
+knew enough for daily practical purposes. His _pension_ was pleasant;
+small, and the few visitors were mostly English.
+
+But there were one or two Americans in the house, and they came home a
+few months later with their account of Raymond and his ways. It was
+needed; for the three or four letters that he had printed in one of our
+newspapers contained little beyond descriptions of set sights--to think
+we should have continued to welcome that sort of thing so long! Well,
+these people reported him as conscientiously busy, for his hour each
+day, with grammar and dictionary. He was also getting his hand in
+painting; and he had "taken on" musical composition, even to
+instrumentation. "Too many irons!" commented my lively young informant.
+"And I think I should get my painting in Paris and my music in Germany."
+She also said that Raymond had next to no social life--he showed hardly
+the slightest desire to make acquaintances.
+
+"An old Frenchman came to the place for a few days," she continued; "and
+as he was leaving he said your friend was living in an ivory tower--the
+windows few, the door narrow, and the key thrown away. 'Ivory tower'--do
+you understand what that means?"
+
+"No," I said. But of course I understand now.
+
+
+III
+
+As a consequence of my call at Johnny McComas's office (or as a probable
+consequence), I received, some six months later, an invitation to his
+wedding. You will expect to hear that I was present, and perhaps acted
+as usher, or even as best man. Nothing of the sort was the case,
+however; I was absent at the time in the East. Nor are you to imagine me
+as continually following, at close range, the vicissitudes, major and
+minor, which made up his life, or made up Raymond's. An exact, perpetual
+attendance of fifty years is completely out of the question. Don't
+expect it.
+
+Johnny married, I was told, a young woman living in his own suburb, the
+daughter of a manufacturer of some means. I met him about two months
+after his great step. He was still full of the new life, and full of the
+new wife.
+
+"She's fine!" he declared. "Not too fine, but fine enough for me."
+
+He cocked his hat to one side.
+
+"Do you know, I talk to her just as I would to a man."
+
+"Johnny!" I began, almost gasping.
+
+"Well, what's wrong? Ever said anything much out of the way to you? Ever
+heard me say anything to any other fellow?"
+
+"Why, no...." I was obliged to acknowledge.
+
+"Then why the row? It's all easy as an old shoe. _She_ likes it."
+
+"I know. But--talking with a woman ... It isn't quite like...."
+
+"Don't make any mistake. Just have the big things right, and they'll
+overlook lots of the little ones."
+
+"H'm," I said doubtfully. "I supposed it was just the other way. Lay a
+lot of stress on certain little things, and larger shortcomings won't
+bother them. Bring her a bunch of flowers to-day, and she'll help you
+deed away the house and lot to-morrow."
+
+"Fudge!" said Johnny. "I mean the really big things. There's only two.
+Ground to stand on and air to breathe."
+
+"That is to say...?"
+
+"A platform under her feet and an atmosphere about her. Well, she's got
+me to stand on and to surround her. She understands it. She likes it.
+Nothing else matters much."
+
+"Ah!" said I.
+
+"I'm her bedrock, and I'm her--How do they say it? I'm her--envelopment,
+as those painting fellows put it."
+
+"See here, Johnny," I protested; "Don't get anachronistic. We are only
+in 1884. That expression won't reach America for ten or fifteen years.
+Have some regard for dates."
+
+"It won't? Wasn't it in your friend's letter?"
+
+"What friend?"
+
+"Why, Prince; when he was in Paris. Didn't you read it to me?"
+
+I remembered.
+
+"Do you know," he went on, "I've been straight as a string--ever since.
+And I'm going to keep so."
+
+"I should hope so, indeed."
+
+"Whatever I may have been before. But I think it's better for a young
+fellow to dash in and find out than to keep standing on the edge and
+just wonder."
+
+"Well, I don't know, Johnny," I returned soberly. "I'm going to be
+married myself, next month. And I expect to go to my bride just as
+pure--"
+
+"No preaching," said Johnny. "The slate's wiped clean. Adele's all right
+for me, and I'm all right to her."
+
+He adjusted his hat, making the two sides of the brim level.
+
+"We're going to move shortly," he stated. "The business can go on where
+it is, for a while, but we're going to live somewhere else."
+
+Perhaps in the city itself, it appeared; perhaps in some suburb toward
+the north. But no longer in one to the west. Johnny was developing some
+such scent for social values and some such feeling for impending
+topographical changes as had begun to stir the great houses that were
+grouped about the Princes.
+
+"So you're the next one?" he said presently. "It's the only life. Good
+luck to you. And who's going to see you through? Prince?"
+
+"Yes--'my friend.' I'm glad you remember him."
+
+"Oh yes; I can remember him when I try. But I don't try very hard or
+very often. Back in this country?"
+
+"He is."
+
+"What's he doing?" Johnny fixed his hard blue eyes firmly on me.
+
+I was sorry to have no very definite answer. "He has been in the East
+lately. He'll be back here in time for me."
+
+"Well," said Johnny darkly; and that was all.
+
+
+IV
+
+Raymond's "tower" was not static, but peripatetic. Early in his second
+summer abroad it was standing among the Dutch windmills for a brief
+season; and when he learned that I was to have a short vacation in
+England--the only quarter of the Old World I ever cared for--he left it
+altogether for a fortnight and came across from Flushing to see me.
+
+Two points immediately made themselves clear. Firstly, he was viewing
+the world through literature--through works of fiction in some cases,
+through guide-books in more. Everything was a spectacle, with himself
+quite outside as an onlooker; and nothing was a spectacle until it had
+been ranged and appraised in print. Secondly, if he was outside of
+things, America was still farther outside; it existed as a remote
+province not yet drawn into the activities and interests of the "world."
+He seemed willing, even anxious, to make himself secondary, subordinate.
+However he may have been on the Continent, here in England his desire to
+conform made him appear subservient and almost abject. My own unabashed
+and unconscious Americanism--the possible consequence of
+inexperience--sometimes embarrassed him, and he occasionally undertook
+to edit my dealings with members of the older half of our race, even
+with waiters and cabmen. As for the more boastful, aggressive,
+self-assertive sort of Americanism, _that_ would make him tremble with
+anger and blush for shame.
+
+I will say this in his behalf, however: he did not like England and was
+not at home there.
+
+"The little differences," he observed, one day, "made more trouble than
+the big ones. A minor seventh is all right, while a minor second is
+distressing. I am happier among the Latins."
+
+Yet I am sure that even among his Latins he took the purely objective
+view and valued their objects of interest according as they were starred
+and double-starred, or left unmarked in the comparative neglect of small
+print.
+
+We saw together Canterbury and Cambridge and Brighton and a few other
+approved places. Through all these he walked with a meticulous
+circumspection, wondering what people thought, asking inwardly if he
+were squaring with their ideas of what conduct should be. Only once did
+I find him fully competent and sufficiently assertive. The incident
+occurred on a late afternoon, in a small side street just off the
+Strand, while I was casting about for one of those letter-pillars.
+Raymond was approached, as was proper to the locality and the time of
+day, by a young woman of thirty who had a hard, determined face and who
+was clothed on with a rustling black dress that jingled with jet. I was
+near enough to hear.
+
+"Good-afternoon," she said.
+
+"Good-afternoon."
+
+"Where," with marked expressiveness, "are you going?"
+
+"I'm going to stand right here."
+
+"Give me a drink."
+
+"Couldn't think of it."
+
+"Stand," she said, with sudden viciousness, "stand and rot!"
+
+Raymond, after an instant's surprise, made a response in his unstudied
+vernacular. "Yes, _I'll_ stand; but you skip. Shoo!"
+
+She was preparing some retort, but he waved both his hands, wide out, as
+if starting a ruffled, vindictive hen across a highway. At the same time
+he caught sight of a constable on the corner, and let her see that he
+saw--
+
+"Constable!"--why, I am as bad as Raymond himself: I mean, of course,
+policeman.
+
+But the London police are sometimes chary in the exercise of their
+functions. What really started the woman on her way was his next brief
+remark, accompanied by the hands, as before, though with a more decided
+shade of propulsion.
+
+"Scoot!" She went, without words.
+
+These were the only American observations I heard from Raymond during
+that fortnight.
+
+I wish he had been as successful on the night of our arrival in London
+when we encountered, in the court behind the big gilded grille of the
+Grand Metropole, the porter of that grandiose establishment. We had come
+together from Harwich and did not reach this hotel until half an hour
+before midnight. We had had our things put on the pavement and had
+dismissed the cab, and the porter, with an airy, tentative insolence,
+now reported the place full.
+
+"_I_ don't know who ordered your luggage down, sir; _I_ didn't," he said
+with a smile that was an experiment in disrespect.
+
+Raymond looked as if he were for immediately adjusting himself to
+this--though I could hardly imagine his ever having done the like in
+Paris or in Florence. He was quite willing to confess himself in the
+wrong: yes, he ought to have remembered that the "season" was beginning;
+he ought to have known that this particular season, though young, had
+set in with uncommon vigor; he ought to have known that all the hotels,
+even the largest, were likely to be crowded and have sent on a wire. The
+porter, emboldened by the departure of the cab, and by my companion's
+contrite silence, began to embroider the theme.
+
+Now a single week in England had taught me that no two men in that
+country--the home of political but not of social democracy--are likely
+to talk long on even terms. One man must almost necessarily take the
+upper hand and leave to the other the lower, and the relation must be
+reached early. I resolved on the upper--cab or no cab. I glared--as well
+and as coldly as I could. The fellow was only a year or so older than I.
+
+"You are too chatty," I said. "Fewer words and more action. If you are
+full, call somebody to take us and our baggage to some hotel near by
+that is not full."
+
+The fellow sobered down and gave us his first look resembling respect.
+
+"Very good, sir. I will, sir. Thank you, sir,"--though he had nothing to
+thank me for, and though he well knew there was to be nothing.
+
+Raymond looked at me as one looks at a friend who surprises by the
+sudden disclosure of some unexpected talent or power.
+
+"But you said 'baggage,'" he commented.
+
+"Indeed I did," said I.
+
+
+V
+
+Our new hotel, we discovered next morning, was duplicated in name by
+another, four doors down the street. During the day we heard the reason
+for this. A domestic difficulty had overtaken husband and wife and the
+two had separated, each keeping an interest in the serviceable name and
+a frontage on the familiar street. We were in the husband's hotel, under
+the very discreet ministrations of the young woman who had caused the
+break. "Do you quite like this?" Raymond had asked me. But he became
+reassured on seeing in the guest-book the names of two or three
+well-known and sufficiently respected compatriots. By the next day he
+was able to cast on Miss Brough, as she flitted (still discreetly)
+through her functions, the eye of a qualified idealization. I am sure he
+would never have viewed indulgently any such situation at home. But the
+poor, patient, cautious girl helped him toward realizing the
+sophistications and corruptions of European society, and so he welcomed
+her. But I believe he avoided speaking to her. She may have been hurt,
+or she may have been amused; or neither. Yet, after all, this
+_contretemps_ was for him, I felt, but a prosaic substitute for
+something richer. A similar situation in Naples, say, taken at close
+range, might have quickened his interest considerably.
+
+Next day there was something different for him to report. He had gone
+into a courtyard off Holborn, drawn by the sound of a hurdy-gurdy. Four
+or five little girls were dancing, and some older women stood looking
+on. For a few moments he looked on too, probably with an effect of aloof
+and amused patronage. But patronage was not for that court.
+
+Presently one of the younger women, who wore a hat full of messy plumes
+and carried a small fish in each hand by the tail, stepped up and
+invited him to trip a measure with her. "Trip a measure"--it has a fine
+Elizabethan or Jacobean sound, whether she used the precise expression
+or not. But Raymond demurred; at first politely; later, perhaps not so
+politely. But he was whisked into the dance and made to take several
+turns. He was so embarrassed that he called it all an "adventure."
+Possibly it was meant for a lesson in manners.
+
+Thus Raymond in England. As he said, he liked the Continent better. I
+hope he showed to better advantage there, and I should have liked to see
+him there--to be with him there. For he rather put a brake on any
+measure of exuberance and momentum which I might have brought to
+England with me, and I could only trust that his strait-jacket was
+partly unlaced among the French and Italians. I think that likely, for
+with them he was, of course, an acknowledged and unmistakable foreigner.
+But my fortnight with him was cramped and uncomfortable; and when we
+parted at the American Exchange--I for Liverpool and he for Calais--I
+confess I had a slight feeling of relief. I felt, too, that my conduct,
+however native and unstudied, had pleased the Island quite as well as
+his.
+
+At the Exchange itself he never read American newspapers--least of all,
+one from his own town. I believe, too, he avoided them on the Continent.
+Living a very special life, he meant to keep himself integral,
+uncontaminate. And behind us both was the other world, his own, all
+vital and astir.
+
+Yes, I am aware that my prose is pedestrian, and that Europe--as it once
+was, to us--deserves a brighter and higher note. I will attempt, just
+here, a purple patch.
+
+Europe, then,--the beacon, hope, and cynosure of our fresh, ingenuous
+youth--the glamorous realm afar which drew to itself from across the sea
+our eager artist-bands, pilgrims to the Old, the Stately, and the Fair;
+Europe, which reared above our dull horizon the towers of Oxford and of
+Notre Dame, sent up into our pale, empty sky the shimmering mirage of
+Venice, and cast across our workaday way the grave and noble shadow of
+Rome; Europe, which gave out through the varying voices of Correggio,
+Canova, Hugo, and Wagner the cry, so lofty and so piercing-sweet, of
+Art; Europe, which with titles and insignia and social grandeurs, once
+dazzled and bemused our inexperienced senses ... and so on.
+
+Easy!
+
+But worth while?
+
+I shall not attempt to decide.
+
+To-day Europe seems not all we once found it; and we, on the other hand,
+have come to be more than some of us at least once figured ourselves. We
+are beginning to have glamours and importances of our own.
+
+
+VI
+
+Raymond lingered on for a year or more in Italy, and came home, as I
+have implied, in time for my wedding. He found his native city more
+uncouth and unkempt than ever. Such it was, absolutely; and such it was,
+relatively, after his years under a more careful and self-respecting
+regime. The population was still advancing by leaps and bounds, and
+hopeful spirits had formed a One-Million Club. A few others, even more
+ardent, said that the population was already a million, or close upon
+it, and busied themselves to start a Two-Million Club. They had their
+eyes wide open to the advantage of numbers, and tightly closed to the
+palpable fact that the community was unable properly to house and
+administer the numbers it already had. The city seemed to cry: "I need a
+friendly monitor--one who will point me out the decencies and compel me
+to adopt them." The demagogue who had ruled and misruled before had been
+reelected once or twice, and the newspapers were still indulging their
+familiar strain of irresponsible and ineffective criticism. The dark
+world behind him had become more populous and bold, and the forces for
+good still seemed unable to organize and cooeperate toward making
+betterment an actuality. But new people were always flocking in--people
+from the farms, villages and country-towns of the Middle region--and
+bringing with them the uncontaminated rustic ideals of rightness and
+decorum: a clean stream pouring into a turbid pool, and the time was to
+come when it would make itself felt. Meanwhile, the city remained--to
+Raymond--a gross, sharp village, one full of folk who, whether from the
+Middle West or from Middle Europe, had never come within ten leagues of
+gentility, and who, one and all, were absorbedly and unabashedly bent on
+the object which had suddenly assembled them at this one favored
+spot--the pushing of their individual fortunes. A hauptstadt-to-be,
+perhaps; but, so far, an immensely inchoate and repellent miscellany.
+
+Raymond's father gave him a sober welcome. His mother attempted a brief,
+spasmodic display of affection; but it was too much, and only a maid
+and her pillows saw her for the next few days. His father seemed older,
+much older; tired, careworn, worried. The trouble of settling old
+Jehiel's estate had been all that could have been expected, and more.
+There were claims, complications, lawsuits, what not; and through all
+this maze James Prince had to put up with the inherited help of the dry,
+dismal old fellow whom I had seen in earlier days at the house. I had
+come, now, to a better professional knowledge of him. He was a man of
+probity, and of some ability, but a deliberate; impossible to hurry, and
+not easy, as it seemed, even to interest. Under him matters dragged
+dully through the courts, and others' nerves were worn to shreds. I
+remember how surprised I was one day on hearing that he had picked up
+enough resolution to die.
+
+Raymond did not much concern himself about his father's burdens. He
+assumed, I suppose, that such taxes on a man's brain and general
+vitality were proper enough to middle age and to the business life of a
+large city. However, he was living--just as he had principally lived
+abroad--on his father's bounty. His contributions to the press--whether
+a daily, or, of late, a monthly--brought in no significant sums; and a
+bequest of some size from his grandfather was slow in finding its way
+into his hands.
+
+As I have said, Raymond might have taken an advantageous position in
+home society. He made no effort, and I sometimes caught myself wondering
+if his attitude might be that there was "nobody here." He might have
+joined his father's club; but the older men principally played billiards
+and talked their business affairs between. However, he did not care for
+billiards, nor had their affairs any affinity with his. A younger
+set--noisy and assertive out of proportion to its numbers--gave him no
+consolation, still less anything like edification. They were _au
+premier plan_; they possessed no background; they were without
+atmosphere--without envelopment, as Johnny McComas might have amended it
+(though no such lack would have been noted or resented by Johnny
+himself). _Bref_, he knew what they all were without going to see. And
+as for "society," it rustled flimsily, like tissue-paper; bright, in a
+way, but still thin and crackling.
+
+I wonder how he found such society as attended my wedding. I shall not
+describe it; I did not describe Johnny's--probably the more important
+event of the two for the purposes of this calm narrative. Yet, if you
+will permit me, I shall touch on two points.
+
+I wish, first, to say that, in my ears and to my eyes, the name "Elsie"
+is just as dear and charming as it ever was. Perhaps, at one period of
+my courtship, I wondered if the name would wear. No name more delightful
+and suitable for a gay, arch, sweet young girl of twenty; but how, I
+asked myself, will the name sit on a woman of forty, or on one of sixty?
+Well, I will confess that, at forty, a certain strain of incongruity
+appeared; but it marvelously vanished during the following score of
+years, and the name now seems utterly right for the dainty figure and
+gentle face of my lifelong companion. And though our eldest daughter is
+unmarried and thirty-five, we have never regretted passing on this
+beautiful name to her.
+
+My second point must deal with Raymond's attitude toward me on my
+wedding-day and on the days preceding it. He was stiff, constrained,
+dissatisfied--merely courteous toward my Elsie, and not at all cordial
+to me. I wondered whether he blamed me for thus bringing him back home;
+but the real reason, as I came to understand later, was quite different.
+He regarded the marriage of a friend as a personal deprivation, and the
+bride as the chief figure in the conspiracy. After my defection, or
+misappropriation, he solaced himself by trying to make one or two other
+friendships. When these friends married in turn, like process produced
+like results. These men, however, he threw overboard completely; in my
+case, he showed, after a while, some relenting, and ultimately even
+forgiveness. By the time he came to marry on his own account, the last
+of his very few bachelor friends had "gone off"; so there was no chance
+of inflicting on anybody that displeasure which others had several
+times inflicted on him.
+
+He sent Elsie a suitable present, and stood beside me through the
+ceremony as graciously as he was able.
+
+"I wish you both great joy," he said firmly, at the end; and it was six
+weeks before we saw him in our little home.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+I
+
+
+Johnny McComas was still carrying on his business life and his home life
+in the suburb where he had married, when I came, finally, to make my
+first call on the domestic group of which he was the nub. Still in the
+future was the day when he was to move into town, and to have also a
+summer home on the North Shore, and to make some of his father-in-law's
+spare funds yield profitable results, and to arouse among wistful clerks
+and unsuccessful "operators" an admiring wonder as the youngest
+bank-president in the "Loop."
+
+I looked in on him one evening in late November. I found a house too
+emphatically furnished and a wife too concerned about making an
+impression. I did not consider myself a young man of prime consequence
+and did not relish the expenditure of so much effort: after all,
+Johnny's standing, Johnny's wife, Johnny's domestic _entourage_ were
+not before a judgment-bar. It was plain to see that for Mrs. John W.
+McComas complete social comfort had not yet been reached, and I wondered
+if the next move might not show it as farther away than ever.
+
+Johnny himself was bluff and direct, and took things as a matter of
+course. Much had been done, but more remained to be done; meanwhile all
+was well and good. After a little, his wife was content to leave us
+alone together, and we drifted to Johnny's "den"--a word new at that
+time, and descriptive of the only feature of his home on which he laid
+the slightest self-conscious emphasis.
+
+I had heard that there were twins--boys; and soon, as the evening was
+still young, I heard the twins themselves. They had reached the age of
+ten months, and consequently had developed wants, but no articulate
+means for making those wants known. Therefore they howled, and they
+began howling in unison now. Perhaps it was for them that a foresighted
+mother had left us alone together.
+
+"Great little hollerers!" said Johnny placidly, pulling at his pipe.
+
+I was still a bachelor. "Might shut the door?" I proposed.
+
+"If you like," said Johnny, without enthusiasm. "They wake me every
+morning at five," he added.
+
+Yes, I was still a bachelor--and probably a tactless, even a brutal,
+one.
+
+"Might move them to another bedroom, farther away?" I suggested. The
+house seemed big enough for such an arrangement.
+
+"Don't want to," declared Johnny. He began pulling at his pipe again,
+and there was a little silence during which I might meditate on the curt
+nobility of his remark.
+
+The fact was, of course, that Johnny loved life; he embraced it with
+gusto, with both arms outspread. No sidestepping its advances; no
+dodging its sharp angles; no feeble mitigating of a situation for which
+he was himself responsible; no paltry deadening of domestic uproar
+merely because he himself happened to be within the domestic
+environment. "If Adele stands it, I will too--they're mine as well as
+hers,"--such I conceive to have been his attitude. Johnny had no nerves,
+and only a minimum of sensibility. The sound-waves broke on his
+sensorium as ripples break on a granite coast. Perhaps they pleased him;
+perhaps they even soothed him. Why, bless you! these children were
+_his_! They were facts as great and as unescapable as the ebb and flow
+of the tides, as dawn and twilight, as the morning and evening stars.
+And the evening stars were singing together. Great may have been the
+jubilation for Johnny's ears, boundless the content in Johnny's heart.
+
+I really think that Johnny felt through the din some of the exhilaration
+that often came to him with a good brisk scrap in his office--or in the
+other man's office. In fact, home and business were Johnny's two sources
+of interest and pleasure--the warp and woof of his life--and he was
+determined on getting the utmost out of each. His interest in his home
+circle may somewhat have declined--or at least have moderated--with
+advancing years, but it was incandescent now. His interest in the
+outside world--that oyster-bin awaiting his knife--never slackened, not
+even when the futility of piling up the empty shells became
+daylight-clear, and when higher things strove perseveringly, even
+unmistakably, to beckon him on. Never, in fact, throughout his life did
+he exhibit more than two essential concerns: one for his family and
+clan; and one for the great outside mass of mediocre individuals through
+whose ineptitudes he justly expected to profit.
+
+Well, the door of the den remained open, and our talk went on to the
+rising and falling of infant voices. At last, thinking that my good-bye
+must be to Johnny only, I rose to go. You might reasonably ask for a
+clearer impression of his home and a more definite account of his wife.
+But what can I say when the primary address was so disconcertingly to
+the ear? Of his wife--who came down, during a lull, at the last
+moment--I can only say that she seemed too _empressee_ at the beginning
+and too casual at the end. Perhaps she had decided that, after all, I
+was no more than I myself claimed to be. Perhaps the infant hurricane
+was still ruffling the surface of her mind, or even disturbing its
+depths.
+
+"I won't ask you to call again," she said, as we shook hands for a
+good-night: "we shall be moving in the spring." She spoke with a
+satisfied air of self-recognized _finesse_, and as in the confident hope
+of completing very promptly some well-planned little programme; but--
+
+"Visit us there," said Johnny, with a quick cordiality which prevented
+his wife from redeeming herself.
+
+"There" had been the chief topic in the den. Many neighborhoods had been
+brought forward, with their attendant advantages and disadvantages.
+Johnny told me what he thought, and let me say what I thought. When I
+listened, it was as a man who might soon have a similar problem to
+consider. When I spoke it was to utter banalities sedately; any
+neighborhood might do, I said, that had good air; yes, and good
+schools--looking toward the future. And any house, I felt, would serve,
+if it had a nursery that was sealed, sound proof, remote....
+
+"Well, best luck in your search for your roof-tree," I said earnestly to
+them both.
+
+"'Roof-tree'!" echoed Johnny. And, in fact, my observation did seem
+rather artificial and insincere.
+
+
+II
+
+By the time Raymond reached home, Johnny McComas had turned his informal
+suburban enterprise into a "state" bank, with his father-in-law as
+president and himself as cashier. The father-in-law lent his name and
+furnished most of the capital; Johnny himself provided the driving
+power. And by the time Raymond had become, through his father's death,
+the head of the family and the controller of the family funds, Johnny
+had turned his state bank into a national bank, with its offices in the
+city and with himself as president; and he had bought--at a bargain--a
+satisfactory house on the edge of the neighborhood where we first met
+him. The street was marked for business advance more promptly and more
+unmistakably than the precise quarter of the Princes. It would do as a
+home for a few years. The transaction appealed both to McComas's thrift
+and his pride. The coming of his new little bank, with its modest
+capital, made no particular stir in the "street"; and the great group of
+houses to the eastward were so apprehensive of open outrage, in one form
+or another, that his approach, in a guise still social, provoked but
+scant concern.
+
+James Prince died when Raymond was about thirty. A careful, plodding man
+who had never brought any direct difficulties upon himself, but who had
+been worried--and worried out--through troubles left him by others. On
+the whole, he had found life an unrewarding thing; and he passed along,
+at fifty-five, with no great regrets. The tangle of family affairs had
+finally been straightened out in considerable measure, though Raymond
+found enough detail still left to make him realize what a five years his
+father had passed through; and when, the year following, his mother
+died, with the settlement of her estate almost overlapping the
+settlement of his father's, he acquired a new sense of the grinding,
+taxing possibilities of business. I speak from his own viewpoint; he was
+susceptible--unduly, abnormally so--to the grind and the tax. After a
+few months of clammy old Brand and his methods, he suddenly cut loose
+from him (without waiting for him to die, as he did a little later); and
+he told me that I was the man to wind up these tedious affairs. They
+were not nearly so difficult and complicated as they seemed to him--they
+were now largely routine matters, in fact; and I hope I carried things
+along at a tempo which satisfied him. This is not to deny that Raymond
+seemed to have days when he found even me dilatory and exasperating; but
+old Brand would probably have driven him mad.
+
+Well, the prospects of his estate were not too brilliant. The lawsuits
+had been expensive and sometimes unsuccessful; the bank had passed a
+dividend, and the old houses, which had meant a lot of money in their
+day, meant less now and even loss in a near future. The time was fast
+coming when this circumscribed and unprotected neighborhood was to
+admit other--and prejudicial--interests: boarding-houses, of course; and
+refined homes for inebriates; and correspondence-schools for engineers;
+and one of the Prince houses became eventually the seat of a
+publishing-firm which needed a little distinction more than it needed a
+wide spread of glass close to the sidewalk.
+
+Whatever the state of Raymond's fortunes, it was easy to see that they
+were not likely to improve in his hands. He detested business, both _en
+gros_ and _en detail_. Despite his ancestry, he seemed to have been born
+with no faculty for money-making, and he never tried to make up his
+deficiency. It was all of a piece with the stone-throwing of his boyhood
+days--he never attempted to improve himself: it was enough to follow the
+gifts with which he had been natively endowed. Precept, example,
+opportunity--all these went for naught. To the end of his days he viewed
+the American "business man" as a portentous and inexplicable
+phenomenon--one to be regarded with distaste and wonder. He persisted
+in thinking of the type as a juvenile one--an energetic and clever boy,
+who was immensely active and immensely productive of results (in an
+immensely limited field), but who was incapable of anything like an
+_apercu_ or a _Weltanschauung_ (oh, he had plenty of words for it!), and
+who was essentially booked to lose much more than he gained. He disliked
+"offices" and abominated "hours." I think that even my own modest
+professional applications sometimes became a puzzle to him....
+
+And here I stand--convicted of having perpetrated another section
+without one short paragraph and without a single line of conversation.
+Let me hasten to bring Raymond to my suite and my desk-side, and make
+him speak.
+
+He came down one morning, as administrator of his mother's estate, to
+consider the appraisal of the personal property--many familiar items,
+and some discouraging ones.
+
+"Do you _have_ to do this?" he asked me, with the paper in his hand. "Do
+you _like_ to do it?"
+
+"The world's work," I rejoined temperately. "It's got to be done."
+
+"H'm!" he returned. "The world's a varied place. And its work is varied
+too. This blessed town must be taught that."
+
+Was he girding himself to be one of its teachers?
+
+From that time on I resolved to take him patiently and good-humoredly: a
+friend must bear a friend's infirmities.
+
+
+III
+
+I did not know, with precision, what phases of the world's work were
+engaging Raymond's attention. I suppose he was adventuring, rather
+vaguely, among the "liberal arts," though he probably saw, by this time,
+that a full professional exercise of any of them was beyond his reach.
+He was heard of as writing short essays and reviews for one or two
+genteel publications, as making water-color tours through the none too
+alluring suburbs, as composing minor pieces for a little musical society
+which he had joined and which he wished to advance, and so on.
+Acquaintances reported him at architectural exhibits and at
+book-auctions--occasions neither numerous nor important. He lived on
+alone in his father's house--expensively; too expensively, of course,
+for it was an exacting place to keep up.
+
+He was coming to be known in a small circle--but an influential one--as
+a young man of wealth, culture, and good-will. But his wealth was less
+than supposed, his culture was self-centred, and his good-will was
+neither broad nor zealous.
+
+However, the new day was coming when he could be turned to account--or
+when, at least, people made the attempt.
+
+This, however, does not mean philanthropy. That was barely dawning as a
+social necessity. The few who were supporting charitable institutions
+and were working in the recently evolved slums were neither conspicuous
+nor fashionable. Nor does it mean political betterment. No efforts had
+yet been successful in substituting for the city's executive incubus a
+man of worthier type, nor was there yet any effective organization
+founded on the assumption--which would have seemed remote and fantastic
+indeed--that a city council could be improved. Parlor lectures on civics
+were of course still farther in the future. Poor government was simply a
+permanent disability, like weather, or lameness, or the fashions; folk
+must get along as best they could in spite of it. The town remained a
+chaos of maladministration and of non-administration; but when the
+decencies are, for the time being, despaired of, one may still try for
+the luxuries. So the city girded itself for a great festival; the nation
+approved and cooeperated, and a vast congeries of white palaces began to
+rise on our far edge.
+
+The detailed execution of this immense undertaking was largely local, of
+course. Though the work was initiated by older heads (some of them were
+too old and were dropped), there were places on the innumerable
+committees for younger ones--for men in their early thirties; their
+vigor, enthusiasm, and even initiative (within understood limits) would
+greatly further the cause. There were (among others) committees on
+entertainment to engage the services of young men of position, leisure,
+and social experience. There were many foreign dignitaries to be
+received and guided; there must be lively and presentable youths to help
+manoeuvre them. Raymond, who was supposed to have mingled in European
+society (instead of having viewed it from afar, in detachment), was
+asked to serve in this field.
+
+There were equally good opportunities for brisk, aggressive young men on
+finance committees and such-like bodies, wherein prominent sexagenarians
+did the heavily ornamental and allowed good scope for younger men who
+had begun to get a record and who wished to confirm ability in
+influential eyes. This opened a road for John W. McComas, who made a
+record, indeed, in the matter of gathering local subscriptions. He
+dented the consciousness of several important men in his own field, and
+got praised in the press for his indefatigability and his powers of
+persuasion. Before the six months of festivity were half over, our
+Johnny had become a "prominent citizen" and his new bank almost a
+household word.
+
+Raymond did less well. The great organization was an executive
+hierarchy: ranks and rows of officials, with due heed not only to
+cooerdination but to subordination. Some men do their best under such
+conditions; others, their worst. Raymond, a strong individualist, a
+pronounced egoist, could not "fall in." Even in his simple field--one
+concerned chiefly with but the outward flourishes--the big machine irked
+and embarrassed him. He withdrew. When an imperial prince was publicly
+"received," with ceremonies that mingled old-world formalities (however
+lamely followed) and local inspirations (however poorly disciplined),
+the moving event went off with no help of his: I believe he even smiled
+at it all from a balcony.
+
+It was here that Raymond began to make clear his true type. He was
+Goethe's "bad citizen"--the man who is unable to command and unwilling
+to obey.
+
+After a particularly flamboyant appreciation of McComas's services in a
+Sunday newspaper, I ventured to touch on our Johnny's rise in Raymond's
+hearing. The two had not met for years; and Johnny had probably no
+greater place in Raymond's mind than Raymond, as I remembered once
+finding, had in Johnny's. But Raymond did not yet pretend to overlook or
+to forget or to ignore him; nor did he yet allow himself to mention
+Johnny as a one-time dweller in his father's stable.
+
+"Why, yes," said Raymond; "he seems to be coming on fast. Climbing like
+anything."
+
+This, I felt, was disapproval, slightly tinctured with contempt. But
+there are two kinds of progress on a ladder or a stairway. There is the
+climbing up, and there is (as we sometimes let ourselves say) the
+climbing down.
+
+It was at the imperial reception that Raymond and Johnny finally met.
+Let us figure Raymond as descending from his satirical balcony, and
+Johnny, with his wife, as earnestly working his way up the great
+stairway--the _scalone_, as Italy had taught Raymond to call it. This
+was an ample affair with an elaborate handrail, whose function was
+nullified by potted plants, and with a commodious landing, whose corners
+contained many thickset palms. A crowd swarmed up; a crowd swarmed down;
+the hundreds were congested among the palms. Johnny, with his wife on
+his arm, was robust and hearty, and smiled on things in general as he
+fought their way up. He took the occasion as he took any other occasion:
+much for granted, but with a certain air of richly belonging and of
+worthily fitting in. His wife--"I suppose it was his wife," said
+Raymond--was elaborately gowned and in high feather: a successful
+delegate of luxury. Obviously an occasion of this sort was precisely
+what she had long been waiting for. Despite the press about her, she
+made her costume and her carriage tell for all they might. A triumphing
+couple, even Raymond was obliged to concede. The acme of team work....
+
+"There we were--stuck in the crowd," said Raymond, whose one desire
+seemed to have been to gain the street. "Not too close, fortunately. I
+had to bow, but I didn't have to speak; and I didn't have to be
+'presented.' He gave me quite a nod."
+
+And no great exercise of imagination was required for me to see how
+distant and reserved was Raymond's bow in return.
+
+
+IV
+
+That autumn, after the festal flags had ceased their flaunting and fire
+had made a wide sweep over the white palaces, Raymond suddenly went
+abroad. It was to be a stay of three or four months. He first wrote me
+from Paris.
+
+He wrote again in December, also from Paris, and told me _tout court_
+that he was engaged to be married. I give this news to you as suddenly
+as he gave it to me.
+
+You can supply motives as easily as I. His parents were gone and his
+family life was _nil_. The old house was large and lonely. You may
+believe him influenced, if you like, by his last view of Johnny McComas
+and by Johnny's amazing effect of completeness and content. You may
+fancy him as visited by compunctions and mortifications due to his
+consciousness of his own futility. Or you may fall back upon the simple
+and general promptings that are smoothly current in the minds of us all.
+My own notion, however, is this: he never would have married at home;
+only an insidious whiff of romance, encountered in France or Italy,
+could have accomplished his undoing.
+
+Raymond's own advices were meagre. "Your emotional participation not
+particularly desired"--such seemed to be the message that lay invisible
+between his few lines. But other correspondents supplied the _lacunae_.
+He was to marry a girl whose family formed part of the American colony
+in the French capital. At least, the feminine members of the family were
+there: the mother, and an elder sister. The father, according to a
+custom that still provoked Gallic comment, was elsewhere: he was
+following the markets in America. The bride-to-be was between nineteen
+and twenty. Raymond himself was thirty-three.
+
+He advised me, later, that the wedding would take place at the end of
+February and requested me to obtain and forward some of the quaint
+documents demanded at such a juncture by the French authorities. He
+added that he hoped for a honeymoon in Italy, but that his fiancee
+favored Biarritz and Pau.
+
+The wedding came off at one of the American churches in Paris. It was a
+sumptuous ceremonial, aided by a bishop (who was on his travels, but who
+had not forgotten to bring along his vestments) and by the attendance of
+half the colony. Raymond was obliged to put up with all this pomp and
+show, much as it ran counter to his tastes and inclinations. But
+fortunately he was made even less of than most young men on such an
+occasion; he had few connections on either side of the water, so the
+bride's connections dominated the day and made her the chief figure
+still more completely than is commonly the case. And the honeymoon was
+spent, not in the north of Italy, but in the south of France.
+
+There are times when a young girl must have her way. And there are times
+when a young husband (but not so young) will determine to have his. I
+knew Raymond.
+
+The couple were in no haste to get home. The four months ran to almost a
+year. I first met the new wife at a reception in the early autumn.
+
+"Gertrude," said Raymond, "let me present to you my old friend--" H'm!
+let me see: what _is_ my name?--Oh, yes: "Gertrude, let me present to
+you my old friend, George Waite."
+
+Can a young bride, dressed in black, and dressed rather simply too, look
+almost wicked? Well, this one contrived to.
+
+The effect was not due to her face, which had an expression of naive
+sophistication, or of sophisticated naivete, not at all likely to
+mislead the mature; nor to her carriage, which, though slightly
+self-conscious, was modest enough, and not a bit too demure. It was due
+to her dress, which, after all, was not quite so simple, either in
+intention or in execution, as it seemed. It was black, and black only;
+and it was trimmed with black jet or spangles or passementerie or
+whatever--let some one else find the name. It was cut close, and it was
+cut low; too close and too low--she was the young married woman with a
+vengeance. It took a tone and bespoke a tradition to which most of us
+were as yet strangers, and our initiation into a new and equivocal realm
+had been too sudden for our powers of adjustment. It was Paris in its
+essence--the thing in itself--and it had all come unedited through the
+hands of a mother and a sister who were so rapt or so subservient as to
+be incapable of offering opposition to the full pungency of the Parisian
+evangel, and of hushing down an emphatic text for acceptance in a more
+quiet environment. I can only say that several nice young chaps looked
+once and then looked away. Raymond himself was inconvenienced. Nor did
+matters mend when, within a week or so, Mrs. Raymond Prince began to
+rate the women of her new circle as "homespun."
+
+Her little hand fell most heavily on these poor aborigines when two or
+three members of Raymond's singing-class loyally came to one of her own
+receptions. These Adeles and Gertrudes of the earlier day were now wives
+and mothers, with the interests proper to such. They had shepherded
+babies through croup and diphtheria, and were now seeing husky,
+wholesome boys and girls of twelve and thirteen through the primary
+schools. When among themselves, they talked of servants and husbands.
+They had not married and gone West or East; they had married at home,
+and they had stayed at home. They had had too many things on their hands
+and minds to catch up much of the recent exoticism stirring about them
+here in town, and they were far from able to cope with this recent
+importation of exoticism from the Rue de la Paix.
+
+Raymond came home, one afternoon, in time for the last half-hour of his
+wife's last reception. Her dress, on this occasion, was quite as daring,
+in its way, as on the other, and original to the point of the bizarre.
+One of the early Adeles was leaving, but she stopped for a moment and
+attempted speech. She was the particular Adele with the piercing soprano
+voice--a voice which had since lowered itself to sing lullabies to three
+successive infants.
+
+"Well, Raymond--" she began hopefully, and stopped. She tried again, but
+failed; and she passed on and out with her words unsaid.
+
+"Well, Raymond--" Yes, I am afraid that that was the impression of more
+early friends than one.
+
+
+V
+
+Raymond had expected, of course, to give his wife her own way at the
+beginning--at the very beginning, that is; and he had expected, equally,
+to have her make a definite impression on the circle awaiting her. But--
+
+Well, he had intended to "take her in hand," and to do it soon. She was
+to be formed, or re-formed; she was to be adjusted, both to things in
+general and to himself especially. Besides being her husband, he was to
+be her kindly elder brother, her monitor, patient but firm; she was to
+enter upon a state of tutelage. He was pretty certain to be right in all
+his views, opinions and practices; and she, if her views, opinions and
+practices were at variance with his, was pretty certain to be in the
+wrong. He assumed that, during those few years in Paris, she had learned
+it all in one big lesson only. The time had been too short to confirm
+all this sudden instruction into a reasoned and assimilated way of life;
+by no means had that superficial miscellany been rubbed into the warp
+and woof of her being. The Parisian top-dressing would be removed and
+the essential subsoil be exposed and tilled....
+
+H'm!
+
+One of the strongest of her early impressions was naturally that of the
+house in which she was to live. It was big and roomy; it was detached,
+and thus open to light and air. But its elephantine woodwork repelled
+her, for she had grown up amid the rococo exuberances of Paris
+apartments. The heavy honesty of black-walnut depressed her after the
+gilded stucco of her mother's salon. And that huge, portentous
+orchestrion took up such an immensity of room!
+
+I doubt if the neighborhood itself pleased her much better, though it
+was homogeneous (in its way), and dignified, and enjoyed an exceptional
+measure of quietude. Perhaps it was too quiet, after some years of a
+balcony on a boulevard. And it is true that some of the big houses were
+vacant, and that some of the families roundabout went away too often and
+stayed away too long. An empty house is a dead house, and when doors and
+windows are boarded up you may say the dead house is laid out. Things
+were sometimes _triste_--the French for final condemnation. The exodus
+so long foreshadowed seemed appreciably under way. This Gertrude became
+increasingly conscious, as the months went on, that most of the people
+she wanted to see and most of the houses she was prompted to frequent
+were miles away, and that the flood-tide of business rolled between.
+
+Of her reaction to the circle in which she first found herself I have
+given you one or two indications. It would be easy, as it would be
+customary, to give some other of her early social experiences in detail
+and her reactions to them; but my interest is frankly in her husband and
+in his reactions. It was of him, too, that I saw the most; and I have
+never gone greatly into society.
+
+At the end of a long and possibly somewhat dull winter his wife began to
+hint the advantageousness of transferring themselves to that other part
+of town. Raymond was not precisely in the position where he cared to pay
+high rent for a small house, while a big house was standing empty and
+unrealizable. Pouts; frowns.... But nature came to his aid. With a new
+young life soon to appear above the horizon, now was no time to shift.
+His son should be born in the house in which he ought to be born. A
+reasonable view, on the whole; and it prevailed.
+
+Raymond had said "son," and son it was. The baby was not named Raymond:
+his father, however much of an egoist, was not willing to put himself
+forward as such so obviously, nor for a period that promised to be
+indefinitely long. Nor was the baby called Bartholomew, after his
+maternal grandfather in the East: for who cared to inflict such an
+old-fashioned, four-syllable name on such a small morsel of flesh? He
+entered the battle under the neutral and not over-colorful pennon of
+Albert: his mother could thus call him "Bertie," and think, not too
+remotely, of her parent on the stock exchange.
+
+Raymond was not long in discovering, after reaching home, what
+sacrifices the new life was to involve. On the Continent, in the midst
+of change and stir, these had not foretold themselves. Back in his own
+house, his interests--"intellectual interests" he called them--began to
+assert themselves in the old way. But he was no longer free to range the
+fields of the mind and take shots at the arts as they rose. Least of all
+was he to read in the evening. That was to neglect, to affront. However,
+the arrival of little Albert--poor tad!--changed the current of his
+wife's own interests and helped to place one more rather vital matter
+in abeyance. He was to live--for a while, anyway--in his present home;
+and he was to pursue--for a while, anyway--some of the accustomed
+interests of his bachelor days. He expected that, before long, his wife
+would accept his environment and the practices he had always followed
+within it. She needed enlightenment on many points. He had already
+communicated some of his views on dress, for example; and he had
+readjusted her notions on the preparation of salads. He gave her, pretty
+constantly, corrective glances through, or over, his eyeglasses,--for
+his sight had begun to weaken early, as his father had foreseen,--and he
+meant that such glances should count. She required to be edited; well,
+the new manuscript was worth his pains, and would be highly creditable
+in its revised version.
+
+
+VI
+
+If one advantage showed forth from a situation that seemed, in general,
+not altogether promising, it was this: Raymond, hearing his native town
+commented upon unfavorably by his wife,--who was keen and constant in
+her criticisms,--began to defend it. It was one thing for the
+native-born to pick flaws; it was another when that ungracious work was
+attempted by a newcomer. And he meant not only to defend it, but to
+remain in it, though his wife had married him partly on the strength of
+his European predilections, and largely on the assumption that a good
+part of their married life would be spent abroad. He even began to
+wonder if he might not join in and help improve things. Like most of his
+fellow-townsmen, he regarded the city's participation in the late
+national festival as a great step in advance,--the first of many like
+steps soon to follow. The day after the Fair was late; but better to be
+late than never. Really, there was hope for the Big Black Botch. More
+and more he felt inclined to lessen still further its lessening
+enormity. After all, this town was the town of his birth: and a
+fundamental egoism cried out that it should be more worthy of him. He
+recalled a group of American women--Easterners--whom, during his first
+trip abroad, he had caught poring over the guest-book of a hotel in
+Sorrento. He was the last male arrival in a slow season; he seemed
+interesting and promising; evidently they had had hopes. "But," asked
+one of them, "how is it you are willing to register openly from such a
+town as that?"--and Raymond had felt the sting. "Such nerve, such
+bumptiousness!" he said to me in recalling that query some years later.
+But he did not add that he had tried to deliver any _riposte_. Instead
+he was now to make a belated return at home, where effort most counted.
+The years immediately to come were to be full of new openings and
+opportunities; in his own way, and under his peculiar handicaps, he was
+to try to take some advantage of them.
+
+
+
+
+PART V
+
+I
+
+
+Little Albert's babyhood kept his mother a good deal at home--and by
+"home" I mean the house in which he had been born. His father's lessened
+interest in Europe (and his diminished deference for it) kept his mother
+at home completely--and by "home" I now mean the town in which Albert
+had been born. Father, mother, and offspring filled the big house as
+well as they could--the big, _old_ house as it was sometimes called by
+those who cherished a chronology that was purely American; and Albert
+was more than a year and a half along in life before his grandmother
+came across to see him and to inspect the distant _menage_. She brought
+her water-waves and her sharpened critical sense, and went back leaving
+the impression that she was artificial and exacting.
+
+"She missed her Paris," said Raymond, "and her drive in the Bois."
+
+"H'm!" said I, recalling that the town's recent chief executive had
+pronounced us, not many years back, the equal of Paris in civic beauty.
+
+"We have no Bois, as yet," he added, thoughtfully. "Do you think we ever
+shall have one?"
+
+He was revolving the Bois, not as a definite tract of park land, but as
+a social institution.
+
+"I think," said I, "that we had better be satisfied with developing
+according to our own nature and needs."
+
+"Yes," he returned; "there was the Frenchman at the fox-hunt: 'No band,
+no promenade, no nossing.' Well, we must go on our own tack, as soon as
+we discover it."
+
+It need not be imagined that his mother-in-law's look-in of a month made
+his wife more contented. She kept on wishing for her new friends in
+another quarter, and (more strongly) for the familiar scenes of the
+other side. Raymond did not wish the expense involved in either move.
+His affairs were now going but tolerably. So far as the bank was
+concerned--a bank that had once been almost a "family" institution--his
+influence was naught. He was only a stockholder, and a smaller
+stockholder than once. His interest, in any sense, was but a brief,
+periodical interest in dividends. These were coming with a commendable
+regularity still. His rentals came in fairly too; but most of them were
+now derived from properties on the edge of the business
+district--properties with no special future and likely only to hold
+their own however favorable general conditions might continue. Travel?
+No. A man travels best in his youth, when he is foot-free, care-free,
+fancy-free. Go traveling too late, or once too often, and there is a
+difference. The final checking-off of something one has "always meant to
+see" may result in the most ashen disappointment of all: even intuition,
+without the pains of actual experience, should suffice to warn. Besides,
+as Raymond said,--
+
+"We've both had a good deal of it. Let's stay at home."
+
+His wife cast about her. There is a mood in which a deprivation of high
+comedy may drive one to low-down farce. To-day people are even going
+farther. A worthy stage is dead, they say; and they patronize, somewhat
+willfully and contemptuously (or with a loose, slack tolerance that is
+worse), the moving pictures. Perhaps it was in some such mood that
+Raymond's wife took up with Mrs. Johnny McComas. They were but three
+streets apart. Mrs. McComas was lively, energetic, determined to drive
+on; and her ability to assimilate rapidly and light-handedly her growing
+opulence made it seem by no means a mere vulgar external adornment. She
+knew how to move among the remarkable furnishings with which she had
+surrounded herself in that old-new house, and how to make the momentum
+gained there serve her ends in the world outside.
+
+"It will be a short life here," her husband had told her on their taking
+possession; "then, a quick sale--at a good figure--to some manufacturing
+concern, and on we go."
+
+"If it's to be short, let's make it merry," she had rejoined; and
+nothing had been spared that could give liveliness to their stately old
+interiors, while those interiors lasted.
+
+Mrs. Raymond Prince vaguely pronounced their house "amusing." It had,
+like Adele McComas herself, a provocative dash which fell in with her
+present mood, and it pleased her that its chatelaine was inclined to
+dress up to its wayward sofas and hangings. She even went with Mrs.
+Johnny on shopping tours and abetted her as her fancies, desires and
+expenditures ran riot. It was a mood of irresponsibility--almost of
+defiant irresponsibility.
+
+Now was the nascent day of the country club. Several of these welcome
+institutions had lately set themselves up in a modest, tentative way.
+Acceptance was complete, and all they had to do was to grow. With one of
+these McComas cast his lot. At the start it was a simple enough affair;
+but Johnny must have sensed its potentialities and savored its
+affinities, its coming congruity with himself. It was to become,
+shortly, a club for the suddenly, violently rich, the flushed with
+dollars, the congested with prosperity--for newcomers who had met
+Success and beaten her at her own game. Stir on all hands, the reek of
+sudden felicity in the air. In later years people with access to better
+things of similar sort were known to become indignant when asked to
+associate themselves with it. "Why should _I_ want to join _that_?" was
+the question they put. But it pleased Johnny McComas, both by its
+present manifestations and its latent possibilities. It was richly in
+unison with his own nature, and I believe he had a ravishing vision of
+its magnificent futurities.
+
+Last year my wife and I were taken to a Sunday afternoon concert out
+there. We found a place of towers and arcades, of endless corridors
+planted with columns and numberless chairs in numberless varieties, of
+fountained courts, of ball-rooms, of concert-halls, of gay apparel and
+cool drinks. We heard of fairs, horse-shows, tournaments in golf and
+tennis. The restaurant, with its acre of tables, glassed and naperied;
+the ranges of telephone booths, all going it together; the cellars, a
+vast subterrene, with dusky avenues of lockers, each cluttered with
+beverages of individual predilection--though I suppose that, after all,
+they were a good deal alike....
+
+Well, it was too much for us; and my Elsie, who is essentially the lady,
+if woman ever was, came away feeling a little dowdy and a good deal out
+of date.
+
+At that earlier period, however, it was still simple; the germ was
+there, but the development of its possibilities had only begun. When
+Mrs. McComas invited Mrs. Prince to drive out with her and see some
+tennis, Mrs. Prince was quite ready to accept.
+
+I do not know just what mode of locomotion they employed. It was in the
+early days of the automobile and Johnny McComas was one of the first men
+in town to have one. I recall, in fact, some of his initial experiences
+with it. On a Sunday afternoon I encountered him in one of these still
+relatively unstudied contraptions on a frequented driveway. Another man
+was sitting beside him patiently. The conveyance was making no progress
+at all. Fortunately it had stopped close enough to the curb not to
+interfere with the progress of other and more familiar equipages.
+
+"We're stuck," said Johnny, jovially, as he caught sight of me. "Ran for
+three or four miles slick as a whistle--and look at us now!" It
+entertained him--a kink in a new toy. And he enjoyed the interest of the
+people collected about.
+
+"You're gummed up, I expect," said I. In those days nobody knew much
+about the new creature and its habits, and one man's guess was as good
+as another's. Two or three bystanders eyed me deferentially, as a
+probable expert.
+
+"Likely enough," he agreed--and that made me an expert beyond doubt.
+"But this will do for to-day. We've been here twenty minutes."
+
+He had the car pushed to a near-by stable, amidst the mixed emotions of
+the little crowd, and next day he had it hauled home.
+
+"You were right," he said, when I met him out again in it, a week later.
+"It _was_ gummed up, so to speak; but it's working like a charm to-day.
+Get in and I'll take you a few miles. That other fellow got an awful
+grouch."
+
+It may have been by this machine, or by some more familiar mode of
+locomotion, that the two women reached the country club and its tennis
+tournament. Gertrude Prince strolled through its grounds and galleries
+with the aloof and amused air of one touring through a foreign town--a
+town never seen before and likely to be left behind altogether within an
+hour or two. It was at once semi-smart and semi-simple. She took it
+lightly, even condescendingly; and when Johnny McComas himself appeared
+somewhat later and set them down at a little marble table near a
+fountain-jet and offered cocktails as a preliminary to a variety of
+sandwiches, she decided, after looking about and seeing a few other
+ladies with glasses before them on other little marble tables, to
+accept. It was a lark in some town of the provinces--Meaux or Melun;
+what difference did it make?
+
+They formed a little group altogether to Johnny's liking. His wife was
+dressed dashingly; his wife's guest made a very fair second; he
+himself, although he never lifted a racquet, was in the tennis garb of
+that day.
+
+"You both look ripping," he declared with hearty satisfaction. To look
+thus, before competing items in the throng, was the object of the place,
+the reason for its developing _mise en scene_.
+
+Johnny himself looked ripping--cool, confident, content, and at the top
+of his days.
+
+"It was amusing...." said Gertrude to me, with an upward inflection, a
+week later.
+
+And she asked me for more about Johnny McComas.
+
+
+II
+
+If those were days when people began to combine for the pursuit of
+pleasure, they were also days when people began to gather at the call of
+public duty. If clubs were forming on the borders, other clubs, leagues,
+societies were forming nearer the centre--organizations to make
+effective the scattered good-will of the well-disposed and to gain some
+betterment in the local political life. To initiate and conduct such
+movements only a few were needed; but the many were expected to
+contribute, if not their zeal and their time, at least their dollars. It
+was patriotic righteousness made easy: a man had only to give his fifty
+dollars or his five hundred to feel, without further personal exertion,
+that he was a good citizen and was forwarding, as all good citizens
+should, a worthy cause. This way of doing it fell in wonderfully well
+with Raymond's temperament and abilities (or lack of them): the
+liberality of his contributions did not remain unknown, and he was
+sometimes held up as a favorable specimen of the American citizen.
+
+Another movement was soon to engage his attention. If the prosperous
+were to have their playgrounds beyond the city's outskirts, the less
+prosperous should have theirs within the city's limits. The scheme of a
+system of small parks and playgrounds quite took Raymond's fancy. It
+contained, besides the idea of social amelioration, the even more
+grateful idea of municipal beautification. In time, indeed, might not
+this same notion, fortified by experience and given a wider
+application, end by redeeming the town not merely in spots but in its
+entirety?--a saved and graced whole, not only as to its heart, but as to
+its liberal and varied borders of water, woodland and prairie.
+
+"I should be proud of that," said Raymond heartily. The name of such a
+city, following one's own name on any hotel-register, would indeed be a
+matter for pride.
+
+He attended several of the early meetings that were designed to get some
+such project, in its simpler form, under way. He had friends among
+professional men in the arts, and some acquaintances among newly formed
+bodies of social workers. He was not slow in perceiving that the way was
+likely to be tedious and hard. It called for organization--the
+organization of hope, of patience, of hot, untiring zeal, of _finesse_
+against political chicane, of persistence in the face of indifference
+and selfishness. "It will take years of organized endeavor," he
+confessed. He recognized his own ineffectiveness beyond the narrow pale
+of hopeful suggestion, and wished that here too the giving of a
+substantial sum--a large penny-in-the-slot--might produce quick and
+facile results.
+
+His wife, it is to be feared, looked upon these activities of his,
+however slight, with a lack-lustre eye. She knew nothing of local
+problems and local needs. She was conscious of a hortatory manner in
+small matters and of indifference, which she almost made neglect, in
+matters that appeared to her to be larger. If she asked for a fairer
+share in his evenings--he belonged to a literary club, a musical
+society, and so on--it was scant consolation to be told that he objected
+to some of her own activities and associations. He did not much care,
+for example, to have her "run" with the McComases and others of that
+type or to have her dawdle over glasses, tall, broad, or short, in
+places of general democratic assemblage; and he told her so. I believe
+it was about here that she began to find him something of a prig and a
+doctrinaire; and she was not incapable, under provocation, of mentioning
+her impressions. It was about here, I suspect, that he told her
+something of Johnny McComas and his origins--at least he once or twice
+spoke of Johnny with a certain sharp scorn to me. He assuredly spoke of
+other country clubs on the other side of town which were more desirable
+for her and equally accessible, save in the material sense of mere
+miles. Though he took no interest in athletics, nor even in the lighter
+out-of-door sports, he was willing to join one of those clubs, if it was
+required of him.
+
+His reference to Johnny McComas was designed, no doubt, to repel her;
+but the effect, as became perfectly apparent, was quite the contrary.
+She was interested, even fascinated, by the rise of a man from so little
+to so much. She found words and words to express her admiration of
+Johnny's type, and when English words ran short she found words in
+French. He was _gaillard_; he had _elan_. What wasn't he? What hadn't
+he? Bits of bravado, I still incline to think.
+
+No, the McComases were not to be left behind all of a sudden. One day
+she made another excursion to the outskirts with them; and she reported
+it to Raymond, with a little air of suppressed mockery, as a perfectly
+unobjectionable jaunt. She had gone with them to the cemetery. Johnny's
+mother had died the year before, and he had been putting up a monument
+in Roselands. This structure, it developed, was no mere memorial to an
+individual. It was a tall shaft, set in the middle of a large lot. I saw
+it later myself: a lavish erection (with all its accessory features
+taken into account)--one designed, as I felt, to show Johnny himself to
+posterity as an ancestor, as the founder of a family line. Assuredly his
+own name, aside from the tall obelisk itself, was the largest thing in
+view.
+
+Raymond took this account of Johnny's latest phase with an admirable
+seriousness; he thought the better of him for it. He himself was
+inclined to divide human-kind into two classes, those who had
+cemetery-lots (with monuments), and those who had not. The latter, of
+course, are in a majority everywhere. One thinks of Naples and of the
+sad road that winds up past the Alhambra to--Well, yes; in a majority,
+of course; and inevitably so in a large town suddenly thrown together
+by a heaping up of fortuitous and miscellaneous elements. In later
+years, when things were going rather badly with Raymond, and when
+consideration seemed to fail, he could always comfort himself with
+thoughts of the Princes' own monument in that same cemetery. This was
+another tall shaft in a gray granite now no longer to be found, and had
+been set up by old Jehiel on the occasion of the reinterment of some
+infants by his first wife--a transaction carried out years before
+Raymond was born. Some of the dates on the base of the monument went
+back to the early thirties. Well, there it stood, with the subordinated
+headstones of Jehiel and old Beulah, of his own parents, and of the
+half-mythical babes who, if they had given nothing else to the world,
+had furnished a future nephew with a social perspective. Raymond,
+reconsidering Johnny's recent effort, now began to disparage that
+improvised background, and led his wife to view his own lot--theirs,
+hers--only a hundred yards from the other. But she could not respond to
+old Jehiel and Beulah--though she tried to be properly sympathetic over
+their son and his wife. Still less could she vitalize the infants who
+had encountered an epidemic on the prairie frontier and had succumbed
+more than three score years ago. If she thought of any child at all, she
+thought doubtless of little Albert (now romping about in his first tweed
+knickerbockers), who would not die for many years, perhaps, and who was
+like enough to be buried in quite another spot.
+
+But I think she thought, most of all, of the manly, cheerful sorrow of
+Johnny McComas before the new monument in the other lot.
+
+
+III
+
+These were also days of panic. Banks went down and bank officials threw
+themselves after. The city was thrilled, even charmed, to find that its
+financial perturbations touched, however slightly, the nerves of London
+and Paris. I myself was in Algeria that winter: my Elsie and I had
+decided on three months along the Mediterranean. It was on the white,
+glaring walls of the casino at Biskra that the news was first bulletined
+for our eyes. It had a glare of its own, I assure you: for a few days
+we knew little enough how we ourselves might be standing.
+
+I thought of the Mid-Continent, with its cumbersome counters and
+partitions done in walnut veneer and its old-fashioned pavement in
+squares of black and white. I thought too of Johnny McComas's new
+institution, with so many bright brass handrails and such a spread of
+tasteful mosaics underfoot. How had they fared? Well, they had fared
+quite differently. Why should a big, old bank go under, while a new,
+little bank continues to float. I cannot tell you. I was far away at the
+time. Perhaps I could not tell you even if I had been on the spot. And
+to other questions, more important still, I may be unable to give, when
+the pinch comes, a clearer answer. The Mid-Continent dashed, or drifted,
+into the rocky hands of a receiver; and McComas's bank, after a
+fortnight of wobbling, righted itself and kept on its way.
+
+I saw Raymond again in March. The receivership was going on languidly.
+Prospects were bright for nobody.
+
+"All this puts an end to _one_ of my plans, anyhow," he said.
+
+"What plan is that?" I asked.
+
+I was reminded that these were also the days of a quickened interest in
+education. This interest was expressing itself in large new
+institutions, and these institutions were generously embodying
+themselves in solid stone--in mullions, groins, gargoyles, finials, and
+the whole volume of approved scholastic detail. Donors were grouping
+themselves in "halls" and dormitories round a certain inchoate campus,
+and were putting on the fronts of their buildings their own names, or
+the names of deceased husbands or wives, fathers or mothers--so many
+bids for a monumental immortality.
+
+"I had hoped for a Prince Hall," said Raymond. And he explained that it
+would have been in memory of his parents.
+
+I must pause for a moment on this matter. I do not believe that Raymond
+had ever thought, in seriousness, of any such gift. It must have been at
+best an errant fancy, and if concerned with commemorating anybody
+concerned with commemorating himself. But I will say this for him: he
+never was disposed to try getting things out of people, for he hated
+attempts at trickery almost as much as he detested the exercise of the
+shrewdness involved in bargaining and dickering. Per contra, he often
+showed himself not averse to giving things to other people; but the
+basis for that giving must be clearly understood all round. He would not
+compete; he would not struggle; he would not descend to a war of wits.
+His to bestow, from some serene height; his the role, in fact, of the
+kindly patron. Let but his own superiority be recognized--let him only
+be regarded as _hors concours_--and he would sometimes deign to do the
+most generous acts. These acts embraced, now and again, the
+entertainment of writers and artists, either at his home or elsewhere:
+his fellows--for he was a writer and an artist too. But it was all done
+with the understanding that there was a difference: he was a writer and
+an artist--but he was something more. Those who failed to feel the
+difference were not always bidden a second time.
+
+And his fancy for patronage was developing just at a time when patronage
+was becoming more difficult, awkward, impracticable! But though "Prince
+Hall" never saw the light, other and humbler forms of patronage came to
+be accepted by him.
+
+Toward the end of April Raymond and his wife joined one of the clubs
+which he had brought to her notice. Though in a formative stage, like
+others, it was good (we ourselves joined it some few years later); and
+she made it her concern, through the summer, to give it some of those
+shaping pats which--for a new club, as for a new vase--have the greater
+value the earlier they are bestowed. She was active about the place, and
+she became conspicuous.
+
+It was soon seen that she was "gay"--or was inclined to be, under
+favoring conditions. The conditions were most favoring, it began to be
+felt, when her husband was not about. A good many thought him stiff, and
+a few who used obsolete dictionary words pronounced him proud--a term
+stately enough to constitute somehow a tribute, though a damnatory one.
+It was soon seen, too, that just as he irked her, so she disparaged
+him--an open road to others.
+
+One day she gave a lunch at the club--places for a dozen. Johnny McComas
+appeared there for the first time. It was a plainer place than his own,
+but I credit him with perceiving that it was much more worth while.
+Adele McComas did not appear--for a good reason. Those obstreperous
+twins now had a little sister two weeks old. The wife was doubtless
+better at home, but was the husband better at the club? If I had been a
+member at that time, and present, I should have felt like following him
+to some corner of the veranda and saying: "Oh, come, now, Johnny, will
+this quite do?" Well, I know what his look would have been--it came
+later. He would have turned that wide, round face on me, with the curly
+hair about the temples which gave him somehow an expression of abiding
+youth and frankness; and he would have directed those hard, bright blue
+eyes of his to look straight ahead at me--eyes that seemed to hold back
+nothing, yet really told nothing at all; and would have disclaimed any
+wrong-doing or any intention of wrong-doing. And I should have felt
+myself a foolish meddler.
+
+Well, the innocent informalities of the summer were resumed by the same
+set in town next winter. The memories and the methods of one season were
+tided over to another. Gertrude was still "gay"--perhaps gayer--and a
+little more openly impatient with her husband, and a little more openly
+disdainful of him. Young men swarmed and fluttered, and those who had
+"never tried it on" before seemed inclined to try it on now.
+
+I take, on the whole, a tempered view--by which I mean, a favorable
+view--of our society and its moral tone. I am assured, and I believe
+from my own observations, that this is higher than in some other of our
+large cities. I dislike scandal, and I have no desire to bear tales.
+Either is far from being the object of these present pages. Nothing that
+I present need be taken as typical, as tyrannously representative.
+
+Raymond criticized, expostulated. Friends began to come to him with
+impressions and reports. I--whether for good or ill--was not one of
+these. They named names--names which I shall not record here. But it was
+one of Raymond's own impressions, and a vivid one, which finally
+prompted him to make a move.
+
+
+IV
+
+January found the social life of the town in full swing. We had
+recovered from last year's financial jolt, and entertaining was
+constant. Raymond and his wife were invited out a good deal. He was
+bored by it all; but his wife remained interested and indefatigable.
+Finally came a dance at one of the great houses. Raymond rebelled, and
+refused point-blank to go: an evening in his library was his mood. His
+wife protested, cajoled, and he finally found a reason for giving in.
+
+As I say, they were bidden to one of the great houses--one of the few
+that possessed an actual facade, a central court, and a big staircase:
+it had too its galleries of paintings and of Oriental curios before
+Oriental curios became too common. Its owner was also, with the rest, a
+musical amateur. He was a man of forty-five, and like Raymond had a wife
+too many years younger than himself for his own comfort. This lively
+lady lived on fiddles and horns--dancing was an inexhaustible pleasure.
+At her dancing-parties, of which she gave three or four a season, her
+husband would show himself below for a few moments for civility's sake,
+and then retire to a remote den on an upper floor, well shut out from
+the sounds of his wife's frivolous measures, but accessible to a few
+habitues of age and tastes approximating his own.
+
+The question of music of another quality and to another purpose was in
+the air--it was a matter of endowing and housing an orchestra. Informal
+_pour-parlers_ were under way in various quarters, and Raymond felt
+disposed, and even able, to contribute in a modest measure. It was his
+pride to have been asked, and it was his pride, despite untoward
+conditions, to put up a good front and do as much as he could. An hour's
+confab over cigarettes in that retired little den might clarify one
+atmosphere, if not another.
+
+The court and its staircase were set with palms, as is the ineluctable
+wont on such occasions and for such places; and people, between the
+dances, or during them, were brushing the fronds aside as they thronged
+the galleries round the court to see the Barbizon masters then in vogue
+and the Chinese jades. As Raymond passed down the stairway, he met his
+wife coming up on the arm of Johnny McComas.
+
+"She looked self-conscious," Raymond said to me, a few days after. I
+told him that he had seen only what he was expecting to see.
+
+"And he looked too beastly self-satisfied." I told him that of late I
+had seldom seen Johnny look any other way.
+
+"Where was his wife?" he asked. I told him she might easily be in the
+crowd on some other man's arm.
+
+"Why were they there at all?" he demanded. And I did not tell him that
+probably they were there through his own wife's good offices.
+
+That meeting on the stairs!--he made a grievance of it, an injury. The
+earlier meeting, with Johnny's own wife on his arm, had annoyed him as a
+general assertion of prosperity. This present meeting, with Raymond
+Prince's wife on Johnny's arm, exasperated him as a challenging
+assertion of power and predominance.
+
+"I shall act," Raymond declared.
+
+"Nothing rash," said I. "Nothing unconsidered, I hope."
+
+"I shall act," he repeated. And he set his jaw more decisively than a
+strong man always finds necessary.
+
+
+V
+
+Raymond's mind was turning more and more to a set scene with McComas;
+some meeting between them was, to his notion, a _scene a faire_. It
+seemed demanded by a Gallic sense of form: it must be gone through with
+as a requisite to his role of offended husband.
+
+One difficulty was that Raymond fluctuated daily, almost hourly, in his
+view of his wife--of _the_ wife, I may say. To-day he took the old
+view: the wife was her husband's property and any attempt on her was a
+deadly injury to him. To-morrow he took the newer view: the wife was an
+individual human being and a free moral agent; therefore a lapse, while
+it meant disgrace for her, was, for him, but an affront which he must
+endure with dignified composure.
+
+Meanwhile the pair saw little of each other, and Albert, puzzled, began
+to enter upon his opportunity (a wide and lingering one it became) for
+learning adjustment to awkward and disconcerting conditions.
+
+Well, Raymond had his meeting. Imagine whether it was agreeable. Imagine
+whether it was agreeable to me, in whose office it was held. Raymond had
+the difficult part of one who must act because he has deliberately
+committed himself to action, yet has no sure ground to act upon, and
+therefore no line to take with real effect. It was here and now that
+McComas turned his round face foursquare to his uncertain accuser, and
+let loose a steady, unspeaking stare from those hard blue eyes, and
+declared that nothing had occurred upon which an accusation could justly
+be based. He was emphatic; and he was blunt; the son and grandson of a
+rustic.
+
+Nothing, he said. Had there really been nothing? You are entitled to
+ask. And I might be inclined to answer, if I knew. I simply don't. I was
+in position to know something, to know much; but everything?--no.
+
+Think, if you please, of the many domestic situations which must pass
+without the full light of detailed knowledge--knowledge that comes too
+late, or never comes at all. Consider the simple, willful girl who
+marries impulsively on the assumption that the new acquaintance is a
+bachelor. Cases have been known where it developed that he was not.
+Consider the phrase of the marriage service, "if any of you know just
+cause or impediment": who can declare that, in a given instance, some
+impediment, moral if not legal, might not be brought against either
+contracting party, however trustful the other? Consider the story of the
+anxious American mother who, alarmed by reports about a fascinating
+scoundrel under whom her daughter was studying music somewhere in
+mid-Europe, went abroad alone to investigate. Her letter to the awaiting
+father, back home, ran for page after page on non-essentials and dealt
+with the real point only in a brief, embarrassed, bewildered postscript
+of one line: "Oh, William, _I don't know_!" Neither do I "know." But my
+account of later events may help you to decide the question for
+yourselves.
+
+Raymond had set his mind on a divorce. If grounds could not be found in
+one quarter, they must be found in another. If McComas, that prime
+figure, was unable to bring aid, then there must be cooeperation among
+the other and lesser figures. Raymond revived and reviewed the tales
+that had involved several younger men. The more he dwelt on them, the
+more inflamed he became, and the more certain that he had been wronged.
+
+I did not accompany him through his proceedings--such advice as I had
+given him near the beginning was the advice simply of a friend. My own
+part of the great field of the law is a relatively unimpassioned
+one--office-work involving real-estate, conveyancing, loans, and the
+like. I suggested to Raymond the proper counsel for the particular case,
+and there, for a while, I left him.
+
+His wife's parents came on from the East. The mother, after some years
+abroad, had lately resumed her domestic duties in the land of her birth.
+The father, who knew all of one subject, and nothing of any other,
+detached himself for a week or two from the one worthy interest in life
+and accompanied her. The "street" was still there when he returned. They
+seemed experienced and worldly-wise in their respective fields and their
+respective aspects, but they entered upon this new matter with a poor
+grace. Here was another mother who did not quite "know," and another
+father who waited, at a second remove, for definite knowledge that did
+not quite come. First there were maladroit attempts to bring a
+reconciliation; and afterwards, and more shrewdly, endeavors to gain as
+much as possible for their daughter from the wreck.
+
+Raymond was determined to keep possession of Albert. Mrs. McComas,
+mother of three, stoutly declared that the mother should have her child.
+Other women said the same, and maintained the point regardless of the
+mother's course or conduct. Many women have said the same in many cases,
+and perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are completely right in the
+case of a boy of six, who surely needs a woman's care. But it is not
+difficult, even when material is more abundant than definite, to throw
+an atmosphere of dubiousness about a woman and to make it appear that
+she is not a "proper person...." So it appeared to the judge in this
+case, and so he ruled--with a shading, however. Albert might spend with
+his mother one month every summer--and some financial concession on
+Raymond's part helped make the time brief. However, she was to have
+nothing to say about Albert's mode of life through the rest of the year,
+and nothing (more specifically) about his education.
+
+"That makes him mine," said Raymond.
+
+And he set his lips firmly. He was one of those who set their lips
+firmly after the event is determined.
+
+I do not know whether Raymond had any real affection for Albert. I do
+not know whether he realized what it was for a father to undertake,
+single handed, the charge of a boy of six. I think that what moved him
+chiefly was his determination to carry a point. However all this may be,
+I remember what he said as, after the decree, he walked out with
+Albert's hand in his.
+
+"Well, it's over!"
+
+Over!--as if a separation involving a child is ever "over"!
+
+
+
+
+PART VI
+
+I
+
+
+His domestic difficulty left behind, Raymond settled down to a
+middle-aged life of dignity and leisure--or attempted to. But the trial
+had rather shaken the dignity, and the sole control of Albert ate into
+the leisure. There followed, naturally, a period of restlessness and
+discontent.
+
+Those who imputed no blame to Raymond still felt it unfortunate, even
+calamitous, that he should not have learned how to get on with a young
+wife. But there were those that did blame him--blamed him for an
+unbending, self-satisfied prig who would have driven almost any spirited
+young woman to desperation. These disparaged him; sometimes--not always
+covertly--they ridiculed him. That hurt not only his dignity, but his
+pride.
+
+Some of you have perhaps been looking for a generalized expression of
+general ideas--for some observations on marriage and divorce which
+should have the detachable and quotable quality of epigram. Yet suppose
+I were to observe, just here, that Marriage makes a promise to the ear
+and breaks it to the hope; or that Divorce is the martyr's crown after
+the tortures of Incompatibility; or that Marriage is the Inferno, the
+Divorce-Court the Purgatory, and Divorce itself the Paradiso of human
+life? You would not be likely to think the better of me, and I should
+certainly think less well of myself. Though I am conscious of a homespun
+quality of thought and diction, I must keep within the limits set me by
+nature, eschewing "brilliancy" and continuing to deal not in abstract
+considerations but in concrete facts.
+
+Little Albert spent a good part of his time in a condition of
+bewilderment; he perceived early that he must not ask questions, that he
+must not try to understand. At intervals he ran noisily through the big
+house and made it seem emptier than ever. A nurse, or governess, or
+attendant of some special qualifications was required--even for the
+short time before he should begin his month with his mother, who was
+spending some months with her parents in the East. Even the
+preliminaries for this small event occasioned considerable thought and
+provoked a reluctant correspondence. His mother--prompted probably by
+her own mother--wrote on the subject of Albert's summer clothes. She
+wished to buy most of them herself. The Eastern climate in summer had
+its special points; also local usage in children's costuming must be
+considered--in detailed appearance her child must conform measurably to
+that particular juvenile society in which he was to appear. Then there
+was the nurse, or governess. Should Albert be brought on by her? And
+should she, once in the East, remain there to take him back; or...?
+
+"Oh, the devil!" cried Raymond, in his library, as he turned page after
+page of diffuse discourse. "How long is she going to run on? How many
+more things is she going to think of?"
+
+And she had felt impelled to address him, despite the cool tone of her
+letter, as "Dear Raymond." And that seemed to put him under the
+compulsion of addressing her, in turn, as "Dear Gertrude"! Truly, modes
+of address were scanty, inadequate.
+
+Well, Albert went East (wearing some of the disesteemed things he
+already possessed) to be outfitted for the summer shores of New Jersey.
+His governess took him as far as Philadelphia, where the Eastern
+connection met him, and "poored" him, sent the woman back home, and took
+him out on the shining sands. During the child's absence she made covers
+for the drawing-room sofas and chairs; the house, bereft of Albert and
+draped in pale Holland, became more dismal than ever.
+
+Raymond, now left alone, was free to devise a way of life in single
+harness. He liked it quite as well as the other way. He told himself,
+and he told me, that he liked it even better. I believe he did; and I
+believe he was relieved by the absence of Albert, whose little daily
+regimen, even when directed by competent assistance, had begun to grind
+into his father's consciousness. I even believe that the one serious
+drawback in Raymond's comfortable summer was the need of studying over a
+school for Albert in the fall.
+
+Raymond spent much of his time among his books. He had long since given
+up trying to "write anything"; less than ever was he in a mood to try
+that sort of exercise now. He looked over his shelves and resolved that
+he would make up a collection of books for the Art Museum. They were to
+be books on architecture, of which he had many. The Museum library, with
+hundreds of architectural students in and out, had few volumes in
+architecture, or none. He visioned a Raymond Prince alcove--those boys
+should be enabled to learn about the Byzantine buildings, just then
+coming into their own; and about the Renaissance in all its varieties,
+especially the Spanish Plateresque. He had a number of expensive and
+elaborate publications which dealt with that period, and with others,
+and he resolved to add new works from outside. He resumed his habit of
+going to book-auctions (though little developed at them), dickered with
+local dealers who limited themselves to a choice clientele, and sent to
+London for catalogues over which he studied endlessly. He would still
+play the role of patron and benefactor. Perhaps he foresaw the time when
+the Museum would recognize donors of a certain importance by bronze
+memorial tablets set up in its entrance hall. Well, he would make his
+alcove important enough for any measure of recognition. It was all a
+work which interested him in its details and which was more in
+correspondence than a larger one with his present means.
+
+
+II
+
+Before my wife and I left for an outing on the seaboard, news came from
+that quarter about Gertrude and Albert. Intelligence even reached us,
+through the same correspondent, regarding Mrs. Johnny McComas. Mrs.
+Johnny, with her three children, was frequenting the same sands and the
+same board walk. It was possible to imagine the arrangement as having
+been suggested by Raymond's one-time wife. See it for yourself. Mrs.
+Raymond and Mrs. Johnny slowly promenading back and forth together, or
+seated side by side beneath their respective parasols or under some gay
+awning shared in common, while their authentic children played about
+them. What if people--whether friends, acquaintances, or
+strangers--_did_ say, "She is divorced"? There she was, with her own son
+plainly beside her and her closest woman friend giving her complete
+countenance. If a separation, who to blame? The husband, doubtless. In
+fact, there was already springing up in her Eastern circle, I was to
+find, the tradition of a dour, stiff man, years too old, with whom it
+was impossible to live.
+
+It is unlikely that Gertrude, at any time--even at this time--would have
+been willing to rank Mrs. Johnny as her closest friend. But Mrs. Johnny
+had spoken a good word for her in a trying season, and at the present
+juncture her friendly presence was invaluable. She could speak a good
+word now--she was, so to say, a continuing witness. The two, I presume,
+were seen together a good deal, along with the children, especially
+Albert; and Mrs. Johnny, cooeperating (if unconsciously) with Gertrude's
+mother, did much to stabilize a somewhat uncertain situation.
+
+It was the understanding that Mrs. Johnny was in rather poor health this
+summer; the birth of her little daughter had left her a different woman,
+and the tonic of the sea-air was needed to remake her into her
+high-colored and energetic self. There was nothing especially reviving
+in the Wisconsin lakes, to which (placid inland ponds) they had confined
+their previous summer sojourns: and the vogue of the fresher resorts
+farther north on the greater lakes had not yet reached them. This year
+let the salt surf roll and the salt winds blow.
+
+My wife and I, in our Eastern peregrinations, passed a few days at the
+particular beach frequented by the two mothers. We really found in Mrs.
+Johnny's aspect and carriage some justification for the incredible
+legend of her poor health. She walked with less vigor than formerly and
+was glad to sit down more frequently; and once or twice we saw her
+taking the air at her bedroom window instead of on the broad walk before
+the shops. Her boys played robustly on the sands, and would play with
+Albert--or rather, let him play with them--if urged to. But, like most
+twins, they were self-sufficing; besides, they were several years older.
+To produce the full effect of team-work between the families required
+some perseverance and a bit of manoeuvring. The little girl was hardly
+two.
+
+Gertrude and her mother welcomed us rather emphatically--too
+emphatically, we felt. The latter offered us politic lunches in the
+large dining-room of their hotel, and laid great stress upon our
+_provenance_ when we met her friends on the promenade. We seemed to be
+becoming a part of a general plan of campaign--pawns on the board. This
+shortened our stay.
+
+The day before we left, Johnny McComas himself appeared. He had found a
+way to leave his widely ramifying interests for a few odd hours. A man
+of the right temperament gains greatly by a temporary estival
+transplantation; and if Johnny always contrived to seem dominant and
+prosperous at home, he now seemed lordly and triumphant abroad. He
+"dressed the part": he was almost as over-appropriately inappropriate as
+little Albert himself. He played ostentatiously with his boys on the
+sands, and did not mind Albert as one of their eye-drawing party. He,
+whether his wife did or no, responded fully and immediately to the salt
+waves and the salt winds.
+
+"Immense! isn't it?" he said to me, throwing out his chest to the breeze
+and teetering in his white shoes, out of sheer abundance of vitality, on
+the planks beneath him.
+
+There was only one drawback: his wife was really not well. And he
+wondered audibly to me, while my own wife was having a few words near by
+with Gertrude, how it was that a young woman could, within the first
+year of her married life, bear twins with no hurt or harm, and yet
+weaken, later, through the birth of a single child.
+
+"She doesn't seem at all lively, that's a fact," he said, with a
+possible touch of impatience. "But another two weeks will do wonders for
+her," he added: "she'll go back all right."
+
+Prepotent Johnny! No doubt it was a drain on vitality to live abreast of
+such a man, to keep step with his robustious stride.
+
+On the forenoon of the day we left, Johnny was walking with Gertrude and
+her mother along the accepted promenade. His excess of vitality and of
+action gave him an air of gallantry not altogether pleasing to see. His
+wife sat at her window, looking down and waving her hand rather
+languidly. The Johnny of her belief had come, in part, assuredly, for a
+bit of enjoyment. She smiled unconcernedly.
+
+
+III
+
+Raymond waited back home for Albert, and Albert did not return. We
+gathered from a newspaper published near the shores of Narragansett Bay
+that Albert, as his mother's triumphant possession, was now being shown
+at another resort--and a more important one, judging by his
+grandmother's social affiliations; also, that Mrs. McComas, who had not
+done any too well on the Jersey shore, was appearing at the new
+_plage_--doubtless as the just and sympathetic friend (of social
+prominence in her own community) who had stood stanch through
+difficulties unjustly endured. Her husband himself had, of course,
+returned to the West.
+
+His business called him, even in mid-summer. He had his bank, but he had
+more than his bank. There are banks and banks--you can divide them up in
+several different ways. There are, of course,--as we have seen,--the
+banks that fail, and the banks that do not. And there are the banks that
+exist as an end in themselves, and the banks that exist as a means to
+other things: those that function along methodically, without taking on
+any extraneous features; and those that serve as a nucleus for
+accumulating interests, as a fulcrum to move affairs through a wide and
+varied range. Of this kind was McComas's. Johnny was not the man to
+stand still and let routine take its way--not the man to mark time, even
+through the vacation season. Nor could he have done so even if he had
+wanted to. But all I need say, just here, is that he came back home
+again after three or four days, all told, and that any threatened
+embarassment was nullified, or at least postponed.
+
+Raymond heard in silence my account of the doings on the Atlantic shore:
+only a wry twist of the mouth and a flare of the nostrils. But as the
+weeks went on, and still no Albert, his anger became articulate.
+
+"I shall teach her that an agreement is an agreement," he declared. "She
+will never try this again."
+
+Albert finally came home, three weeks late; his mother brought him
+herself. The governess transferred him from the hands of one parent to
+those of the other; and Raymond had asked my presence for that moment,
+as a sort of moral urge.
+
+"Who knows," he asked, "what delay she may try for next?"
+
+He gave one look at the picturesque, if not fantastic, toggery of his
+restored child.
+
+"Did you ever see anything like that?" he said scornfully; and I foresaw
+a sacrificial bonfire--or its equivalent--with Albert presently clothed
+in sane autumn garb.
+
+Albert was followed, within a week, by a letter from his mother. This
+was diffuse and circumlocutory, like the first. But its general sense
+was clear. If Raymond was thinking of putting Albert into a
+boarding-school....
+
+"There she goes again!" exclaimed the exacerbated father. "A matter with
+which, by hard-and-fast agreement, she has absolutely nothing to do!"
+
+However, if he was thinking of a boarding-school....
+
+"A child barely seven!" cried Raymond. "Why, half of them will hardly
+consider one of eight!"
+
+Still, if he was thinking--well, Mrs. McComas knew of a charming one, an
+old-established one, one in which the head-master's wife, a delightful,
+motherly soul.... And it was just within the Wisconsin line, not forty
+miles from town....
+
+"I see her camping at the gate!" said Raymond bitterly. "Or taking a
+house there. Or spending months at a hotel near by. Constantly fussing
+round the edge of things. Running in on every visitors' day...."
+
+"Likely enough," I said. "A mother's a mother."
+
+"Well," rejoined Raymond, "the boy _shall_ go to school--in another
+year. But the school will be a good deal more than forty miles from
+here--no continual week-end trips. And it will not be in a town that has
+an endurable hotel--that ought to be easy to arrange, in this part of
+the world. No, it won't be near any town at all. I don't suppose she
+would take a--tent?" he queried sardonically.
+
+"To some mothers the blue tent of heaven would alone suffice," I
+said--perhaps unworthily.
+
+"Rubbish!" he ejaculated; and I felt that a word fitly spoken--or
+perhaps unfittingly--was rebuked.
+
+
+IV
+
+In due season, Albert went off to school, according to his father's
+plans; and it was not the school which Adele McComas had hoped to see
+Albert enter a little before her own boys should leave it. Raymond,
+after another year of daily attentions to Albert's small daily concerns,
+was glad to have him away. He did not see his boy's mother a frequent
+visitor at this school, nor did he purpose being a frequent visitor
+himself. The establishment was approved, well-recommended: let it do its
+work unaided, unhindered.
+
+No, Adele McComas never saw Albert at the school of her predilection;
+indeed, it was not long after the choice had been made that she lost all
+opportunity of seeing anything at all. She withered out, like a
+high-colored, hardy-seeming flower that belies all promise, and died
+when her little girl was months short of four.
+
+Her name was on the new monument within six weeks. It was the third
+name. That of Johnny's father had lately been placed above that of his
+mother, and that of his wife was now clearly legible upon the opposite
+side of the shaft's base. Some of Johnny's friends saw in this
+promptitude a high mark of respect and affection; others felt a haste,
+almost undue, to turn the new erection into a bulletin of "actualities";
+and a few surmised that had the work not been done with promptitude it
+might have come to be done in a leisurely fashion that spelled neglect:
+if it were to be done, 't were well it were done quickly--a formal token
+of regard checked off and disposed of.
+
+During Albert's first year at his school his mother made two or three
+appearances. She was exigent, and she showed herself to the school
+authorities as fertile in blandishments. The last of her visits was made
+in a high-powered touring-car. Raymond heard of this, and warned the
+school head against a possible attempt at abduction.
+
+The second year opened more quietly. One visit--a visit without
+eagerness and obviously lacking in any fell intent, and that was all.
+It was fair to surmise that this once-urgent, once-vehement mother had
+developed a newer and more compelling interest.
+
+She had made herself a figure at Adele McComas's funeral--or, at least,
+others had made her a figure at it. She began to be seen here and there
+in the company of the widower, and it was reported privately to me that
+she had been perceived standing side by side with him in decorous
+contemplation, as it were in a sort of transient, elegiac revery _a
+deux_, before the monument. It was no surprise, therefore, when we
+heard, two months later, that they had married.
+
+"That stable-boy!" said Raymond. "After--me!"
+
+The expression was strong, and I did not care to assent.
+
+Instead, I began:--
+
+"And now, whatever may or may not have been, everything is--"
+
+"Everything is right, at last!" he concluded for me.
+
+"And if they--those two--are put in the right," he went on, "I suppose I
+am put in the wrong--and more in the wrong than ever!"
+
+He stared forward, across his littered table, beyond his bookcases,
+through his thick-lensed glasses, as if confronting the stiffening
+legend of a husband too old, too dry, too unpliable; the victim,
+finally, of a sudden turn that was peculiarly malapropos and
+disrelishing, the head of a household tricked rather ridiculously before
+the world.
+
+Reserve now began to grow on him. He simplified relationships and saw
+fewer people. Before these, and before the many at a greater remove, he
+would maintain a cautious dignity as a detached and individual human
+creature, as a man,--however much, in the world's eyes, he might have
+seemed to fail as a husband.
+
+
+V
+
+John W. McComas, at forty-five, was in apogee. His bank, as I have said,
+was coming to be more than a mere bank; it was now the focus of many
+miscellaneous enterprises. Several of these were industrial companies;
+prospectuses bearing his name and that of his institution constantly
+came my way. Some of these undertakings were novel and daring, but most
+of them went through; and he was more likely to use his associates than
+they were to use him. As I have said, he possessed but two interests in
+the world: his business--now his businesses--and his family; and he
+concentrated on both. It might be said that he insisted on the most
+which each would yield.
+
+He concentrated on his new domestic life with peculiar intensity. His
+boys were away at a preparatory school and were looking forward to
+college. He centred on his daughter, a future hope, and on his wife, a
+present reality and triumph. Over her, in particular, he bent like a
+flame, a bright flame that dazzled and did not yet sear. He was able, by
+this time, to coalesce with the general tradition in which she had been
+brought up--or at least with the newer tradition to which she had
+adjusted herself; and he was able to bring to bear a personal power the
+application of which she had never experienced. She found herself
+handled with decision. She almost liked it--at least it simplified some
+teasing problems. He employed a direct, bluff, hearty kindness; but
+strength underlay the kindness, and came first--came uppermost--if
+occasion seriously required. Life with Raymond had been a laxative, when
+not an irritant; life with Johnny McComas became a tonic. She had felt
+somewhat loose and demoralized; now she felt braced.
+
+Johnny was rich, and was getting richer yet. He was richer, much, than
+he had been but a few years before; richer than Raymond Prince, whose
+worldly fortunes seemed rather to dip. Johnny could give his wife
+whatever she fancied; when she hesitated, things were urged upon her,
+forced upon her. She, in her turn, was now a delegate of luxury. He
+approved--and insisted upon--a showy, emphatic way of life, and a more
+than liberal scale of expenditure. He wanted to show the world what he
+could do for a fine woman; and I believe he wanted to show Raymond
+Prince.
+
+Gossip had long since faded away to nothingness. If anybody had wondered
+at Johnny's course--a course that had run through possible dubiousness
+to hard-and-fast finality--the wonder was now inaudible. If anybody felt
+in him a lack of fastidiousness, the point was not pressed. The marriage
+seemed a happy solution, on the whole; and the people most
+concerned--those who met the new pair--appeared to feel that a problem
+was off the board and glad to have it so.
+
+Raymond, on the eve of the marriage, had softened things for himself by
+leaving for a few months in Rome. Back, he began to cast about for some
+means of occupation and some way of making a careful assertion of his
+dignity. At this time "society" was beginning to sail more noticeably
+about the edge of the arts, and an important coterie was feeling that
+something might well be done to lift the drama from its state of
+degradation. Why not build--or remodel--a theatre, they asked, form a
+stock company, compose a repertory, and see together a series of such
+performances as might be viewed without a total departure from taste and
+intelligence?
+
+The experiment ran its own quaint course. The remodeling of the hall
+chosen introduced the sponsors of the movement to the fire-laws and
+resulted in a vast, unlooked-for expense. A good company--though less
+stress was laid on its roster than on the list of guarantors--went
+astray in the hands of a succession of directors, not always competent.
+The subscribers refused to occupy their boxes more than one night a
+week, and, later on, not even that: the space was filled for a while
+with servitors and domestic dependents, and presently by nobody....
+
+Raymond went into the enterprise. He put in a goodly sum of money that
+never came back to him; and if he cooeperated but indifferently, or
+worse, he was not more inept than some of his associates. He was
+displeased to learn that the McComases had given enough to the
+guarantee-fund to insure them a box. And it offended him that, on the
+opening night, his former wife, one of a large and assertive party,
+should make her voice heard during intermissions (and at some other
+times too) quite across the small auditorium. The situation was
+generally felt to be piquant, and at the end of the performance people
+in the lobby were amused (save the few who had the affair greatly at
+heart) to hear Johnny McComas's comment on the play. It was a
+far-fetched problem-play from the German, and Raymond had been one of
+those who favored it for an opening.
+
+"Did you ever see such a play in your life?" queried Johnny. "What was
+it all about? And wasn't _he_ the fool!"
+
+McComas--really caring nothing for the evening's entertainment either
+way--could easily afford a large amount for social prestige, and his
+wife for general social consolidation. It was little to Johnny that his
+thousands went up in exacting systems of ventilation and in salaries for
+an expensive staff; but it was awkward for Raymond to lose a sum which,
+while absolutely less, was relatively much greater. After a few months
+the scheme was dropped; the expensive installation went to the advantage
+of a vaudeville manager; Raymond felt poorer, even slightly crippled,
+and the voice of the present Mrs. Johnny McComas ran till the end
+across that tiny _salle_.
+
+This, I am glad to say, was the last of Raymond's endeavors to patronize
+the arts.
+
+
+VI
+
+Albert's last year at his distant school ended rather abruptly. He came
+home, ailing, about a month before the close of the school year. He was
+thin and languid. He may have been growing too fast; he may have been
+studying too hard; he may have missed the "delightful motherly soul" who
+would have brooded over him at the school first proposed; or the
+drinking-water may have been infected--_que sais-je_? Well, Albert moped
+during much of May through the big house, and his mother heard of his
+return and his moping, made the most of it, and insisted on a
+visitation.
+
+The child-element, of late, had not been large in her life. Her two tall
+stepsons were flourishing in absence; she had had no second child of her
+own; little Althea was nice enough, and she liked her pretty well....
+But there was her own flesh and blood crying for her--perhaps. So she
+descended on the old, familiar interior--familiar and distasteful--and
+resumed with zeal the role of mother.
+
+Her presence was awkward, anomalous. The servants were disconcerted, and
+scarcely knew how to take her fluttery yet imperious orders. For Raymond
+himself, as any one could see, it was all purgatory--or worse. Every
+room had its peculiar and disagreeable memories. There was the
+chamber-threshold over which they had discussed her tendency to out-mode
+the mode and to push every extreme of fashion to an extreme still more
+daring--for that black gown with spangles, or whatever, had been but the
+first of a long, flagrant line. There was the particular spot in the
+front hall, before that monumental, old-fashioned, black-walnut
+"hat-rack," where he had cautioned more care in her attitude toward
+young bachelors, if only in consideration of his own dignity, his
+"face." There was the dining-room--yes, she stayed to meals, of course,
+and to many of them!--where (in the temporary absence of service) he
+had criticized more than once the details of her housekeeping and of her
+menu--had told her just how he "wanted things" and how he meant to have
+them. And in each case she had pouted, or scoffed, and had contrived
+somehow to circumvent him, to thwart him, and to get with well-cloaked,
+or with uncloaked, insistence her own way. Heavenly recollections! He
+felt, too, from her various glances and shrugs, that the house was more
+of a horror to her than ever, and, above all, that abominable
+orchestrion more hugely preposterous.
+
+Albert kept mostly to his room. It was the same room which Raymond
+himself had occupied as a boy. It had the same view of that window above
+the stable at which Johnny McComas had sorted his insects and arranged
+his stamps. The stable was now, of course, a garage; but the time was on
+the way when both car and chauffeur would be dispensed with. Parallel
+wires still stretched between house and garage, as an evidence of
+Raymond's endeavor to fill in the remnant of Albert's previous vacation
+with some entertaining novelty that might help wipe out his recollection
+of the month lately spent with his mother. Albert was modern enough to
+prefer wireless--just then coming in--to "bugs" and postage-stamps; but
+the time remaining had been short. Besides, Albert liked the theatre
+better; and Raymond, during those last weeks in August, had sat through
+many woeful and stifling performances of vaudeville that he might regain
+and keep his hold on his son. His presence at these functions was
+observed and was commented upon by several persons who were aware of the
+aid he was giving for a bettered stage.
+
+"Fate's irony!" he himself would sometimes say inwardly, with a sidelong
+glance at Albert, preoccupied with knockabouts or trained dogs.
+
+Albert spent some of his daylight hours in bed; some in moving about the
+room spiritlessly. He looked out with lack-lustre eyes at the sagging
+wires, and seemed to be wondering how they could ever have interested
+him. His mother, as soon as she saw him, put him at death's door--at
+least she saw him headed straight for that dark portal. She began to
+insist, after a few days, that he go home with her: he would be hers, by
+right, within a fortnight, anyhow. Her new house, she declared, would be
+an immensely better place for him, and would immensely help him to get
+well, if--with a half-sob--he ever _was_ to get well.
+
+She knew, of course, the early legend of Johnny McComas, and had no wish
+to linger in its locale.
+
+"You _do_ want to go with your own, own mother--don't you, dear?"
+
+"Yes," replied Albert faintly.
+
+The town-house of Johnny McComas, bought at an open-eyed bargain and on
+a purely commercial basis, had some time since fulfilled its predestined
+function. It had been taken over, at a very good price, by an automobile
+company; the purchasers had begun to tear it down before the last load
+of furniture was fairly out, and had quickly run up a big block in
+russet brick and plate glass. Gertrude McComas had had no desire to
+inherit memories of her predecessor; if she had not urged the promptest
+action her husband's plan might have given him a still more gratifying
+profit.
+
+They had built their new house out on the North Shore. At one time the
+society of that quarter had seemed, however desirable to the McComases,
+somewhat inaccessible. But the second wife was more likely to help
+Johnny thitherward than the first. Besides, the participation of the new
+pair in the scheme of dramatic uplift--however slight, essentially--had
+made the promised land nearer and brighter. They might now transplant
+themselves to that desired field with a certainty of some few social
+relations secured in advance.
+
+They had a long-reaching, rough-cast house, in a semi-Spanish style,
+high above the water. They had ten acres of lawn and thicket. They had
+their own cow. And there was little Althea--a nice enough child--for a
+playmate.
+
+"Let me get Albert away from all this smoke and grime," his mother
+pleaded--or argued--or demanded, dramatically. "Let me give him the
+pure country air. Let me give him the right things to eat and drink. Let
+me look after his poor little clothes,--if" (with another half-sob) "he
+is ever to wear them again. Let me give him a real mother's real care.
+You _would_ like that better, wouldn't you, dear?"
+
+"Yes," said Albert faintly.
+
+It is quite possible, of course, that his school really had scanted the
+motherly touch.
+
+"You see how it goes!" Raymond finally said to me, one evening, in the
+shadow of the orchestrion. "And what she will dress him in _this_
+time...!"
+
+The whole situation wore on him horribly. There was a light play over
+his cheeks and jaws: I almost heard his teeth grit.
+
+A few days later Albert was transferred to his mother's place in the
+country. Raymond consoled himself as best he might with the thought that
+this sojourn was, after all, but preliminary, as Gertrude had herself
+implied, to the coming month on the Maine coast or at Mackinac. A change
+of air, a greater change of air, a change to an air immensely and
+unmistakably and immediately tonic and upbuilding--that, as his mother
+stated, with emphasis, was what Albert required.
+
+So Albert, by way of introduction to his real summer, came to be
+domiciled under the splendid new roof of Johnny McComas--a roof, to
+Raymond's exacerbated sense, gleaming but heavy. Its tiles--he had not
+seen them, but he readily visualized them--bore him down. He was not
+obliged, as yet, to meet McComas himself. That came later.
+
+
+
+
+PART VII
+
+I
+
+
+Albert recovered in due season--a little more rapidly, it may be, than
+if he had stayed with his father, but not more completely. His education
+progressed, entering another phase, and still with the unauthorized
+cooeperation of his mother. During his stay with her she had really
+wrought no great havoc in his wardrobe, whatever she may have
+accomplished on a previous occasion. In fact, Albert had reached the
+point where he dressed in a manlier fashion--a fashion fortunately
+standardized beyond a mother's whims. In his turn, as it had been with
+his brothers by marriage, it was now the real preparatory school, with
+college looming ahead.
+
+By this time Raymond had completely made his belated adieux to aesthetic
+concerns and had begun to concentrate on practical matters--on his own.
+They needed his attention, even if he had not the right quality of
+attention to give. I had my doubts, and they did not grow less as time
+went on. Raymond was now within hail of fifty, and he added to his long
+list of earlier mistakes a new mistake peculiar to his years and to his
+training--or his lack of it.
+
+Briefly, he assumed that age in itself brought knowledge, and that young
+men in their twenties--even their late twenties--were but boys. The
+disadvantage of holding this view became apparent when he began to do
+business with them. He depended too much on his own vague fund of
+experience, and did not realize how dangerous it might be to encounter
+keen specialists--however young--in their own field. He was now engaged
+in a general recasting of his affairs, and they came to him in
+numbers--bright, boyish, young fellows, he called them. He tended to
+patronize them, and he began to deal with them rather informally and
+much too confidently.
+
+The family bank, after languishing along for a liberal time under its
+receiver, had been wound up, and the stockholders, among whom he was a
+large one but far from the largest, accepted the results and turned wry
+faces to new prospects elsewhere. The family holdings of real-estate, on
+the edge of the central district rather than in it, did not share the
+general and almost automatic advance in values, and an uncertain,
+slow-moving scheme for a general public improvement--one that
+continually promised to eventuate yet continually held off--had kept one
+of his warehouses vacant for years: its only income was contributed by
+an advertising company, which utilized part of its front as a
+bulletin-board. Rents in this quarter kept down, though taxes--more
+through rising rates than increased valuations--went up. And those two
+big old houses! Raymond still lived, too expensively in one, and paid
+interest on a cumbering old mortgage. The other--old Jehiel's--was
+rented, at no great advantage, to a kind of correspondence school which
+conducted dubious courses and was precarious pay.
+
+In such circumstances Raymond began to lend an ear to offers of
+"real-estate trades" and to suggestions for reinvestments. But
+real-estate, in which almost everybody had once dabbled (with advantage
+assumed and usually realized), had now become a game for experts.
+Profits for the few: disaster--or at least disillusionment--for the
+many. Raymond thought he could "exchange" to advantage, and the bright
+young men (who knew what they were about much better than he did)
+flocked to help him. Well, one man in a hundred exchanges with profit;
+the ninety-and-nine, the further they go the more they lose--onions
+peeled coat by coat. Thus Raymond, until I heard of some of his
+operations and tried to stop them. One frank-faced, impudent young chap,
+who thought he was secure in a contract, I had to frighten off; but
+others had preceded him.
+
+Investments were offered him too: schemes in town, and schemes--bolder
+and more numerous--out of town. Some of these had the support of McComas
+and his "crowd," and turned out advantageously enough, for those on the
+"inside"--to continue the jargon of the day and its interests; but
+Raymond sensitively, even fastidiously, stepped away from these, and
+trusted himself, rather, to financial free lances who often were not
+only without principle, but also without definite foothold.
+
+"If you would only consult me!" more than once I had occasion to
+remonstrate. "Who are these people? What organization have they
+got--what responsibility?"
+
+But though he would dicker with strangers, who took hours of his time
+with their specious palaverings, he shrank more and more from his own
+tenants and his own agents. One rather important lease had to be renewed
+over his head--or behind his back. Still, I do not know that, on this
+particular occasion, his interests greatly suffered.
+
+Thus Raymond began to approach a permanent impairment of his affairs at
+an age when recuperation for a man of his deficiencies was as good as
+out of the question. Further on still he began to suspect--even to
+realize--that he was unfitted to cope with adults. In his later fifties
+he began to pat children on their heads in parks and to rub the noses
+of horses in the streets. With the younger creatures of the human race
+and with the gentler orders of the brute creation he felt he could trust
+himself, and still escape disaster. If he found little girls sticking
+rows of fallen catalpa-blossoms on the spikes of iron fences, he would
+stop and praise their powers of design. He became susceptible to tiny
+boys in brown sweaters or infinitesimal blue overalls, and he seldom
+passed without a touch of sympathy the mild creatures that helped
+deliver the laundry-bundles or the milk. Especially if they were white:
+he was always sorry, he said, for white coats in a dirty town.
+
+But such matters of advancing age are for the future.
+
+
+II
+
+As regards the affairs of McComas, I naturally had a lesser knowledge.
+They were more numerous and more complicated; nor was I close to them. I
+can only say that they went on prosperously, and continued to go on
+prosperously: their success justified his concentration on them.
+
+As regards his home and his domestic affairs, I can have more to say. My
+wife and I called once or twice at their new house; with a daughter of
+twenty-odd, there was no reason why we should not cultivate that
+particular suburb, and every reason why we should.
+
+Johnny's two sons were at home, briefly, as seniors who were soon to
+graduate. They were tall, hearty lads, with some of their father's high
+coloring. One of them was to be injured on the ball-field in his last
+term, and to die at home a month later. The other, recovering some of
+the individuality which a twin sometimes finds it none too easy to
+assert, was to marry before he had been out of college six weeks--marry
+young, like his father before him. The girl, young Althea, rather
+resembling her mother,--her own mother,--was beginning to think less of
+large hair-bows and more of longer dresses. Her father was quite wrapped
+up in her and her stepmother seemed to take to her kindly.
+
+Johnny, in conducting us over his house, laid great stress on her room.
+On her suite, rather; or even on her wing. She had her own study, her
+own bath, her own sleeping porch and sun-parlor. Everything had been
+very delicately and richly done. And she had her own runabout in the
+garage.
+
+"The boys will go, of course," Johnny said to us, with his arm about his
+daughter; "but our little Althea will be a good girl and not leave her
+poor old father."
+
+Ah, yes, girls sometimes have a way of lingering at home. Our own Elsie
+has always remained faithful to her parents.
+
+Johnny had chosen to call himself "old" and "poor." Of course he looked
+neither. True, his chestnut hair was beginning to gray; but it made,
+unless clipped closer than he always wore it, at least an intimation of
+a florid aureole of crisp vigor; and his whole person gave an exudation
+of power and prosperity. No sorrow had come to him beyond the death of
+his parents--an inevitable loss which he had duly recorded in public.
+That record had yet to receive another name--and yet another.
+
+His wife, who had seemed to begin by bracing herself to stand against
+him, now seemed to have braced herself to stand with him--perhaps a more
+commendable wifely attitude. I mean that the discipline incident to a
+life of success which was not without its rigors had become to her
+almost a second nature. The order of the day was cooeperation, team-work;
+in the grand advance she was no straggler, no malingerer. It was a
+matter of pride to keep step with him; she was now beyond the fear which
+possibly for the first few years had troubled her--the fear that he, by
+word, or look, or even by silence, might hint to her that she was not
+fully "keeping up." Johnny himself was now rather heavy; for the regimen
+which they were pursuing he had the strength that insured against any
+loss of flesh through tax on the nerves. His wife, for her part, looked
+rather lean--trained, even trained down. As the wife of Raymond, she
+would probably have lapsed by now into pinguitude and sloth--unless
+discontent and exasperation had prevented.
+
+After showing us the private grandeurs of their own estate, they
+motored us to the cooerdinated splendors of their club. It had been a
+good club--one of the best of its kind--from the start, and now it had
+grown bigger and better. Its arcaded porches and its verandas were wide;
+its links showed the hand of the expert, yet also the sensitive touch of
+the landscape gardener; an orchestra of greater size and merit than is
+common in such heedless gatherings played for itself if not for the
+gossiping, stirring throng; and people talked golf-jargon (for which I
+don't care) and polo (of which I know even less). Though the day was one
+in the relatively early spring, things were "going"; temporary backsets
+would doubtless ensue--meanwhile get the good out of a clear, fair
+afternoon, if but a single one.
+
+Through all this gay stir the McComases contrived to make themselves
+duly felt. Johnny himself was one of the governors, I gathered; as such
+he took part in a small, hurried confab in the smoking-room. Whether or
+not there was a point in dispute, I do not know; but when he rose and
+led me forth with his curved palm under my elbow the matter had been
+settled his way, and no ill-feeling left: rather, as I sensed it, a
+feeling of relief that some one had promptly and energetically laid a
+moot question for once and all.
+
+His two tall boys I saw walking, with an amiable air of an habituated
+understanding, around a billiard-table: "Can you beat them?" asked
+Johnny proudly, as we passed the open window. His daughter circulated
+confidently, as being almost a member in full and regular standing
+herself. She seemed to know intimately any number of girls of her own
+age, and even a few lads of seventeen or so--an advantage which our
+Elsie, at that stage, never quite enjoyed, and which, due allowance made
+for altered conditions, she was somewhat slow in gaining, later.
+
+And about his wife? Well, the slate appeared to have been wiped--if
+there really had been any definite marks upon it. Assuredly no smears
+were left to show. Those of the younger generation of seven or eight
+years before had used the time and arranged their futures, and the
+still younger were pressing into their places--witness Johnny's own
+brood. Gertrude McComas was now a self-assured though careful
+matron--careful, I thought, not to ask too much of general society;
+careful not to notice whether or no she received too little; careful,
+most of all, not to let it appear that she _was_ careful. Perhaps it was
+this care which made up a part of her general strain--and enabled her to
+keep the lithe slenderness of her early figure.
+
+We came back to town--the three of us--by train. Both of my Elsies were
+thoughtful. Certainly we were playing a less brilliant part than the
+family we had just left.
+
+
+III
+
+Meanwhile Albert pursued his studies. Though he had not so far to come
+for a short vacation as the McComas young men, he spent the short
+vacations at the school. He was at an awkward age, and Raymond, who
+could see him with eyes not unduly clouded by affection, felt him to be
+an unpromising cub. He was no adornment for any house, and no
+satisfying companion for his father. So he passed the Easter week among
+his teachers.
+
+McComas too saw little of Albert. Those months with his mother were
+usually worked off at some distant resort, which his stepfather was
+often too busy to reach. Only once did he spend any of the allotted time
+in McComas's house. This was a fortnight in that grandiose yet tawdry
+fabric which had been sacrificed to business, and the occasion was an
+illness in the family (not Albert's) which delayed the summer's outing.
+McComas had accepted Albert with a large tolerance--at least he was not
+annoyed. In fact, the boy's mother, however she may have harassed
+Raymond, never (to do her justice) pushed Albert on her second husband.
+So, when the juncture arrived,--
+
+"Why, yes," Johnny had said, "have him here, of course; and let him stay
+as long as you like. He doesn't bother _me_."
+
+Well, Albert went ahead, doing his Latin, and groping farther into the
+dusky penumbra of mathematics. "Why?" he asked; and they explained that
+it was the necessary preparation for the university. Albert pondered. He
+began to fear that he must continue learning things he didn't want or
+need, so that he might go ahead toward learning other things he didn't
+want or need. He took a plaintive, discouraged tone in a letter to his
+mother; and she--making an exception to her rule--passed along the
+protest to McComas. She felt, I suppose, that he would give an answering
+note.
+
+Johnny laughed. He himself cared nothing for study; and he was so
+happily constituted, as well as so constantly occupied, that he never
+had to take refuge in a book.
+
+"Oh, well," he said, broadly, "he'll live through it all, and live it
+down. I expect Tom and Joe to. The final gains will be in quite another
+direction."
+
+Raymond had heard the same plaint from Albert, and was less pleased. The
+boy was clearly to be no student, still less a lover of the arts.
+Raymond passed over all thought of old Jehiel, the ruthlessly
+acquisitive, and placed the blame on the other grandfather, who was now
+in an early dotage after a lifelong harnessing to the stock-ticker.
+
+"_I_ don't know how he's coming out!" was Raymond's impatient remark,
+over one of Albert's letters. "Who knows what _any_ boy is going to be?"
+
+Albert accepted his school readily enough as a place of residence. He
+did not now need, so much as before, his mother's small cares--in fact,
+was glad to be relieved from them; nor was he quite advanced enough to
+profit from a cautious father's hints and suggestions. I found myself
+hoping that Raymond, at the coming stage of Albert's development, might
+have as little trouble as I had had over my own boy (with whose early
+career I shall not burden you). Yet, after all, fathers may
+apprehensively exchange views and cautiously devise methods of approach
+only to find their efforts superfluous: so many boys come through
+perfectly well, after all. Simply consider, for example, those in our
+old singing-class. The only one to occasion any inconvenience was Johnny
+McComas, and he was not a member at all.
+
+The one side of the matter that began to concern Raymond was the money
+side. Albert cost at school, and was going to cost more at college. His
+father began to economize. For instance, he cut off, this spring, the
+contribution which he had been making for years in support of an
+organization of reformers that had been working for civic betterment.
+These men, considering their small number and their limited resources
+had done wonders in raising the tone and quality of the local
+administration. The city's reputation, outside, had become respectable.
+But a sag had begun to show itself--the relapse that is pretty certain
+to follow on an extreme and perhaps overstrained endeavor. The little
+band needed money. Raymond was urged to reconsider and to continue--the
+upgrade would soon be reached again. Raymond sent, reluctantly, a
+smaller amount and asked why the net for contributions was not cast a
+little wider. He even suggested a few names.
+
+Whether he mentioned the name of John W. McComas I do not know, but
+McComas was given an opportunity to help.
+
+"See what they've sent me," he said to me one day on the street.
+
+He smiled over the urgent, fervid phrases of the appeal. The world, so
+far as he was concerned, was going very well. It didn't need
+improvement; and if it did, he hadn't the time to improve it.
+
+"They appear to be losing their grip," he added. "They didn't do very
+well last election, anyhow."
+
+I sensed his reluctance to be associated with a cause that seemed to be
+a losing one.
+
+"Well, I don't know," I said. "I'm giving something myself; and if I can
+afford to, you can."
+
+But he developed no interest. He sent a check absurdly disproportionate
+to his capacity (he was embarrassed, I am glad to say, when he mentioned
+later the amount); and I incline to think that even this bit was done
+almost out of a personal regard for me.
+
+Raymond cut a part of his own contribution out of Albert's allowance,
+and there was better reason than ever why Albert should not take a long
+trip for only four or five days at home.
+
+
+IV
+
+It is tiresome, I know, to read about municipal reform; most of us want
+the results and not the process--and some of us not even the results.
+And it is no less tiresome to read about investments, unless we are
+dealing with some young knight of finance who strives successfully for
+his lady's favor and who, successful, lives with her ever after in the
+style to which her father has accustomed her. But in the case of a
+maladroit man of fifty....
+
+I had asked Raymond to call on me with any new scheme that was taking
+his attention, and one forenoon he walked in.
+
+He had an envelope of loose papers. He laid some of them on my desk and
+thumbed a few others with an undecided expression.
+
+"What do you think of this?" he asked. "I've got to have more money, and
+here's something that may bring it in."
+
+It was a speculative industrial affair in Upper Michigan. I saw some
+familiar names attached--among them that of John W. McComas, though not
+prominently.
+
+"I'll find out for you," I said.
+
+"I don't want you to find out from him."
+
+"I'll find out."
+
+Raymond fingered his envelope fussily: there was nothing left in it.
+
+"It's all costing me too much. Extras at that school. That big
+house--too big, too expensive. I can't lug it along any farther. Find me
+some one to buy it."
+
+"I'll see," I said.
+
+I told him about our visit to the club, two or three months before. I
+implied, in as delicate and circumambulatory a way as possible, that his
+one-time wife, according to my own observations, taken under peculiarly
+favorable, because exacting, conditions, was completely accepted.
+
+"Oh yes," he replied, as if the matter had been settled years ago, and
+as if he had long had that sense of it. Yes, he seemed to be saying, the
+marriage had made it all right for her, and had soon begun to make it
+better for him. Possibly not a "deceived" husband; and no longer so
+rawly flagrant a failure as a human companion.
+
+"Their house is good, I gather," he went on. "There were some plates of
+it in the architectural journals. Just how good he doesn't know, I
+suppose--and never will."
+
+"I found him fairly appreciative of it."
+
+"Possibly--as a financial achievement brought about by his own money."
+
+"He's learning some of its good points," I declared.
+
+"There was some talk of having Albert there, just before they went off
+to the Yellowstone." He frowned. "Well, this can't go on so many more
+years, now."
+
+I did not quite get Raymond's attitude. He did not want the boy with him
+at home. He did not want to meet any extra expenses--and Mrs. McComas
+was assuredly paying Albert's way through mid-summer, as well as
+eternally buying him clothes. I think that what Raymond wanted--and
+wanted but rather weakly--was his own will, whether there was any
+advantage in it or not, and wanted that will without payments, charges,
+costs.
+
+I disliked his grudging way, or rather, his balking way, as regarded a
+recognition of the liberality of his former wife's husband--for that was
+what it came to.
+
+I returned his prospectus. "I'll look this up. How about that company in
+Montana?" I continued.
+
+"They've passed a dividend. I was counting on something from that
+quarter."
+
+"And how about the factory in Iowa?"
+
+"That will bring me something next year."
+
+"Well," I said, doubling back to the matter that had brought him in,
+"I'll inquire about this and let you know."
+
+In the course of a few days I called on McComas. Others were calling.
+Others were always calling. If I wanted to see him I should have to
+wait. I had expected to wait. I waited.
+
+When I was finally admitted, he rose and came halfway through his
+splendors of upholstery to give me an Olympian greeting.
+
+"It's brass tacks," I said. "Three minutes will do."
+
+"Four, if you like."
+
+"Three. Frankly, very frankly, is this a thing"--here I used the large
+page of ornamental letter-press as word-saver--"is this a thing for an
+ordinary investor?"
+
+"Ordinary investor"--that is what I called Raymond. Perhaps I flattered
+him unduly.
+
+"Why," responded McComas, with a grimace, "it's a right enough thing for
+the right man--or men. Several of us expect to do pretty well out of
+it."
+
+"'Several'? How about the rank outsider?"
+
+"Anybody that _you_ know sniffing?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Well--Prince."
+
+"H'm." Johnny pondered; became magnanimous. "Well, it ain't for him.
+Pull his nose away. I don't want his money."
+
+He knew what he had taken. He may have had a prescience of what he was
+yet to take. He could afford an interim of generosity.
+
+
+V
+
+A year or so went on, and we met the McComases at a horse-show. Once
+more it had become distinguished to have horses, and to exhibit them--in
+the right place. Althea was with her parents; so was the survivor of the
+stalwart twins.
+
+Johnny had taken the blow hard. That a son of his, one so strong and
+robust, a youth on whom so much time and thought and care and money had
+been lavished to fit him for the world, should go down and go out (and
+in such a sudden, trivial fashion)--oh, it was more than he felt he
+could endure. But he was built on a broad plan; his nature, when the
+test came, opened a wide door to the assimilation of experiences and
+offered a wide margin for adjustment to their jars. His other son, the
+full equal of the lost one, still survived and was present to-day; and
+Johnny, grandly reconciled, was himself again.
+
+Althea had taken the interval to make sure about her hair-ribbon and her
+skirts. The ribbons had been pronounced outgrown and superfluous, and
+had been banished. The suitability of longer skirts had been felt, and
+had been acted upon. Althea was now almost a young lady, and a very
+pretty one.
+
+I say it without bitterness. The beauties of nature--those trifles that
+make the great differences--are indeed unequally distributed among human
+creatures. Not all girls are pretty; not all attractive; not all
+equipped to make their way. No.
+
+You will assume for yourselves the greenery of grass and trees, the slow
+cumuli in the afternoon sky, the lively, brightly dressed throngs on
+lawns and verandas, and the horses; yes, even those were present,
+somewhere or other.
+
+Gertrude McComas was of the crowd; suitably dressed (or, perhaps,
+attired), a little less spare than once, and somehow conveying the
+impression, if unobtrusively, that her presence was necessary for the
+completeness of the function. She was pleasant with Althea, who had a
+horse on her mind and a number on her back.
+
+Gertrude had returned from the North with Althea and Albert, a week
+before Albert's allotted time with her was up, so that they might all be
+a part of this occasion. Albert was now taller than his father, had
+begun to gather up a little assertiveness on reaching the end of his
+preparatory days, had taken his examinations, and was understood to be
+within a month or so of college.
+
+I cannot say that Althea's skirts, however much thought she had given
+them, were long to-day. The only skirts she wore were the skirts of her
+riding-coat. The rest of her was boots and trousers; and she carried a
+little quirt with which she flecked the dust from her nethers, now and
+again, rather smartly.
+
+Albert looked--obviously envious, and obviously perturbed. His various
+knockings from pillar to post had left him without horse and without
+horsemanship. And here was a young feminine (almost a relative, in a
+sense; well, was she, or was she not?) who was dressed as he (with some
+slight differences) might have been dressed, and who was doing (or was
+about to do) some of the things that he himself (as he was now keenly
+conscious) had always hankered to do.... How was he to take it all?--the
+difference, the likeness, the closeness, the distance....
+
+And we--my wife and I--became suddenly, poignantly, even bitterly aware
+that our Elsie, beside us in her tailor-made, had never been on a horse
+in her life--and was now perhaps too old to make a good beginning.
+
+After a little while Althea was carried away for her "entry" or "event,"
+or whatever they properly call it--for I am no sportsman. Some small
+section of the crowd interested itself about the same time--at least got
+between us and the proceedings. We saw little or nothing--just heads,
+hats and parasols. All I know is that, in a few moments, Althea
+reappeared--I think she had leaped something. Her father was by her
+side, vastly proud and happy. Her mother (as I shall say for short)
+arrived from somewhere, with a gratified smile. Her big brother
+presently drew up alongside on a polo-pony, and gave her a big,
+flat-handed pat in the middle of her placard, and a handsome young
+woman, who was pointed out to us as the wife he had married in February,
+during our fortnight at Miami, reached up to her bridle-hand and gave it
+a squeeze. And there was a deep fringe of miscellaneous friends,
+acquaintances and rivals.
+
+"What do you think of our daughter, now!" asked Johnny, loudly and
+generally, as he lifted Althea down. He looked about as if to sweep
+together the widest assemblage of praises and applause. Many flocked;
+many congratulated; but still further tribute must be levied. McComas
+caught sight of Albert. The young fellow stood on the edge of the thing,
+staring, embarrassed, shaken to his centre.
+
+"Here, you, Albert!" Johnny cried; "come over and shake hands with the
+winner!"
+
+And meanwhile, Raymond, off by himself somewhere or other, I suppose,
+may have been studying how in the world he was ever going to put Albert
+through Yale.
+
+
+VI
+
+Business once more!
+
+It ought to be barred. I get enough of it in my daily routine without
+having it intrude here. Business should do no more than provide the
+platform and the scenic background for the display of young love, hope
+and beauty. But here we have to deal with the affairs of a worried and
+incompetent man half way through his fifties.
+
+Raymond came in one morning, on my summons. His manner was depressed; it
+was becoming habitually so. I tried to cheer him with indifferent
+topics,--among them the horse-show, which I saw so unsatisfactorily and
+which I have described so inadequately. He had already heard about it
+from Albert, and he felt no relish for the friendliness Johnny McComas
+had displayed on that occasion.
+
+"Trying to get _him_, too?" was Raymond's comment.
+
+"Oh, I wouldn't quite say _that_...."
+
+"I have a letter from his mother. She wants to know about college."
+
+"Well, how _are_ things?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know; poor."
+
+"That Iowa company?"
+
+"Next year."
+
+"Again?"
+
+"Yes--next year; as usual."
+
+"Well, I have news for you."
+
+"Good?" he asked, picking up a little.
+
+"That depends on how you look at it. I have a buyer for your house."
+
+"Thank God!"
+
+"Don't hurry to thank God. Perhaps you will want to thank the Devil."
+
+Raymond's face fell. "You don't mean that _he_--on top of everything
+else--has come forward to--?"
+
+"My friend! my friend! It isn't that at all. 'He' has nothing to do with
+it. Quite another party."
+
+And it was. A Mr. Gluckstein, a sort of impresario made suddenly rich by
+a few seasons with fiddlers and prima donnas, was the man. He was
+willing, he said,--and I paid the news out as evenly and considerately
+as I could,--he was willing to take the house and assume the
+mortgage--but he asked a bonus of five thousand dollars for doing it.
+
+"The scoundrel!" groaned Raymond, his face twisted by contemptuous rage.
+"The impudent scoundrel!"
+
+"Possibly so. But that is his offer--and the only one. And it is his
+best."
+
+Raymond sat with his eyes on the floor. He was afraid to let me see his
+face. He hated the house--it was an incubus, a millstone; but--
+
+He visibly despaired. "What shall I do about Albert's college, now?" he
+muttered presently.
+
+He seemed to have passed at a bound beyond the stage of sale and
+transfer. The odious property was off his hands--and every hope of a
+spare dollar had gone with it.
+
+"His mother writes--" began Raymond.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"She tells me--Well, her father died last month, it seems, and she is
+expecting something out of his estate...."
+
+"Estate? Is there one?"
+
+"Who can say? A man in that business! There might be something; there
+might be nothing or less. And it might take a year or more to get it."
+
+"And if there is anything?"
+
+"She says she will look after Albert's first year or two. I was about to
+refuse, but I expect I shall have to listen now."
+
+He was silent. Then he broke out:--
+
+"But there won't be. That old woman with her water-waves and her
+wrinkles is still hanging on; even if there should be anything, she
+would be the one to get most of it. I know her--she would snatch it
+all!"
+
+"Listen, Raymond," I said; "you had better let _me_ help you here."
+
+"I don't want you to. There must be some way to manage."
+
+He fell into thought.
+
+"I doubt if she can do anything, herself. Whatever she did would come
+through him in the end. You say he likes Albert?" He was silent again.
+"I don't want to meet either of them--but I would about as soon meet him
+as her."
+
+I saw that he was nerving himself for another _scene a faire_. Well, it
+would be less trying than the first one. If his sense of form, his
+_flair_ for fatalism, still persisted, ease was out of the question and
+no surrogate could serve.
+
+Perhaps, after all, there had been nothing between those two. Anyway, in
+the general eye the marriage had made everything right. She was
+accepted, certainly. And as certainly he had lived down, if he had ever
+possessed it, the reputation of a hapless husband.
+
+He wrote to her in a non-committal way--a letter which left loopholes,
+room for accommodation. Her reply suggested that he call at the bank;
+she would pass on the word. He told me he would try to do so. I saw the
+impudent concert-monger was to have his house.
+
+And so, one forenoon, at eleven or so, Raymond, after some
+self-drivings, reached the bank; by appointment, as he understood.
+Through the big doors; up the wide, balustraded stairway--it was the
+first time he had ever been in the place. He was well on the way to the
+broad, square landing, when some lively clerks or messengers, who had
+been springing along behind him, all at once slackened their pace and
+began to skirt the paneled marble walls. A number of prosperous
+middle-aged and elderly men were coming down together in a compact
+group. It seemed as if some directors' meeting was in progress--in
+progress from one office, or one building, to another. In the middle of
+the group was John W. McComas.
+
+He was absorbed, abstracted. Raymond, like some of the other up-farers,
+had gained the landing, and like them now stood a little to one side.
+McComas looked out at him with no particular expression and indeed with
+no markedness of attention.
+
+"How do you do?" he said indifferently.
+
+"I'm pretty well," said Raymond dispiritedly.
+
+"And that was all!" he reported next day in a high state of indignation.
+"Don't suppose I shall try it again!"
+
+But a careless Gertrude had failed to inform her husband of the
+appointment. She had been busy, or he had been away from home....
+
+"Go once more," I counseled, I pleaded.
+
+A note came to him from McComas--a decent, a civil. Come and talk things
+over--that was its purport. He went.
+
+McComas, as you can guess, was very bland, very expansive, very
+magnanimous (to his own sense). "I _like_ Albert!" he declared heartily.
+But he did little to cloak the fact that it was his own money which was
+to carry the boy through college.
+
+Raymond was in the depths for a month. After Gluckstein had got his deed
+for the house and Albert had packed his trunk for the East, he felt that
+now indeed he had lost wife, home and son.
+
+
+
+
+PART VIII
+
+I
+
+
+Before leaving his house for good and all, Raymond spent a dismal
+fortnight in going over old papers--out-of-date documents which once had
+interested his father and grandfather, books, diaries and memoranda
+which had occupied his own youthful days: the slowly deposited,
+encumbering sediment of three generations, long in one place. There were
+several faded agreements with the signature of the ineffable individual
+who had married into the family, had received a quit-claim to those
+suburban acres, and had then, at a point of stress, refused to give them
+back. There were sheaves of old receipted bills--among them one for the
+set of parlor furniture in the best (or the worst) style of the Second
+Empire. There were drafts of Raymond's early compositions--his first
+attempts at the essay and the short story; there was an ancient, heavily
+annotated Virgil (only six books), and there was a sheepskin algebra in
+which he had taken, by himself, a post-school course as a means of
+intellectual tonic, with extra problems dexterously worked out and
+inserted on bits of blue paper....
+
+"I filled the furnace seven times," he said to me, laconically.
+
+I myself felt the strain of it all. It is less wearing to move every two
+or three years, as most of us do, than to move but once--near the end of
+a long life, of a succession of lives.
+
+I never asked what Mr. Gluckstein thought of the orchestrion.
+
+Raymond went to live at a sort of private hotel. Here he read and wrote.
+He carried with him a set of little red guide-books, long, long since
+out of date, and he restudied Europe in the light of early memories. He
+also subscribed to a branch of a public library in the vicinity--a
+vicinity that seemed on the far edge of things. However, the tendency of
+the town has always been centrifugal. Many of our worthies, if they have
+held on to life long enough, have had to make the same disconcerting
+trek.
+
+From this retreat Raymond occasionally issued to concerts and
+picture-exhibitions. I do not know that he was greatly concerned for
+them; but they carried on a familiar tradition and gave employment still
+to a failing momentum.
+
+From this same retreat there would issue, about the Christmas season, a
+few watercolors on Italian subjects. If they were faint and feeble, I
+shall not say so. We ourselves have one of them--an indecisive view of
+the ruins in the Roman Forum. It is not quite the Forum I recall; but
+then, as we know, the Roman Forum, for the past half-century, has
+altered almost from year to year.
+
+Letters reached him occasionally from Albert the freshman. They might
+well have come from Albert the sophomore. Raymond showed me one of them
+on an evening when I had called to see him in his new quarters.
+
+He was comfortable enough and snug. On the walls and shelves were books
+and pictures that I remembered seeing in his boyhood bedroom.
+
+"I like it here," he said emphatically. And in truth it was the den of a
+born bachelor--one who had discovered himself too late.
+
+Well, Raymond passed me Albert's letter. He showed it to me, not with
+pride, but (as was evident from the questioning eye he kept on my face)
+with a view to learning what I thought of it. He was asking a verdict,
+yet shrinking from it.
+
+Albert was rather cocky; also, rather restless--I wondered if he would
+last to _be_ a sophomore. And he displayed little of the consideration
+due a father. Clearly, Raymond, as a parent, had been weighed and found
+wanting. Albert's ideal stood high in another quarter, and his life's
+ambition might soon drive him in a direction the reverse of academic.
+
+"How does it strike you?" asked Raymond, as I sat mulling over Albert's
+sheets.
+
+I searched my mind for some non-committal response.
+
+"Well," Raymond burst out, "he needn't respect _me_ if he doesn't admire
+_him_!"
+
+
+II
+
+Albert's response to McComas at the horse-show had not been noticeably
+prompt or adroit, but he cast about manfully for words and presently was
+able to voice his appreciation of Althea's feat (as it was regarded) and
+to congratulate her upon it. Johnny McComas was not at all displeased.
+Albert had not been light-handed and graceful, but he developed (under
+this sudden stress) a sturdy, downright mode of speech which showed
+sincerity if not dexterity. The square-standing, straight-speaking
+farm-lad--straight-speaking, if none too ready--was sounding an
+atavistic note caught from his great-grandfather back in York State.
+
+"Stuff in him!" commented Johnny. "It's a wonder, but there is. Must be
+his mother."
+
+Albert made no particular impression, however, on Althea herself. A
+dozen other young fellows had been more demonstrative and more fluent.
+He simply slid over the surface of her mind and fell away again. She had
+known him--intermittently--for years as a somewhat inexpressive boy;
+now, as a potential gallant, he was negligible, as compared with others.
+But Albert, speaking in a sense either specific or general, did not mean
+to remain negligible.
+
+He soon forgot most of the details of the day at the horse-show. He had
+hardly a greater affinity for sport than his father had had. He began
+his sophomore year with no interest in athletics. The compulsory
+gymnasium-work bored him. He made no single team--put forth not the
+least effort to make one. The football crowd, the baseball crowd, even
+the tennis crowd, gave him up and left him alone.
+
+Yet his bodily energies and his mental ambitions were waxing daily; his
+passions too. There must be an outlet for all this vigor--business, or
+matrimony, or war. In one short twelvemonth he compassed all three.
+
+By the end of Albert's second year, the day had come when a
+self-respecting young man of fortune and position found it hard if he
+must confess: "I have taken all yet given nothing." The Great War waged
+more furiously than ever, and came more close. The country had first
+said, "You may," and, later, "You must." Albert did not wait for the
+"must." He closed his year a month or so in advance--as he had done once
+before--and enrolled in a college-unit for service abroad.
+
+Raymond gave his consent--a matter of form, a futility. In fact, Albert
+enrolled first and asked (or advised) later. His mother, of a mixed
+mind, would have interposed an objection. McComas hushed her down. "Let
+him go. He has the makings of a man. Don't cut off his best chance."
+
+McComas had a right to speak. Tom McComas was going too, and going with
+his father's warm approval. If he could leave a young wife and a
+three-year-old boy, need a young bachelor student be held back?
+
+Albert came West for a good-bye. His father held his hand and gave him a
+long scrutiny--part of the time with eyes wide open, part of the time
+with eyes closed to a fine, inquiring, studious line. But he never saw
+what there was to see. In his own body there was not one drop of martial
+blood; in his being not an iota of the bellicose spirit. Why men fight,
+even why boys fight--all this had been a mystery which he must take on
+faith, with little help from the fisticuffs and brawls of school-days,
+or even from the gigantic, agonizing closing-in of whole peoples, now
+under way.
+
+Yet Albert understood, and meant to take his share.
+
+Who, indeed, as Raymond had once asked petulantly, could know what a boy
+was going to be?
+
+When Althea saw Albert in khaki, she _saw_ him: this time no
+indifference, no fusing him with the crowd, no letting him fade away
+unnoticed. If he had shaken before her on her hurdle-taker, she now
+shook before him in his brown regimentals. It was as if, in an instant, he
+had bolted from their familiar--their sometimes over-familiar--atmosphere.
+He confused, he perturbed her: he was so like, yet so different; so close,
+yet so remote. Was he a relative, of sorts--a relative in some loose
+sense; or was he a strange young hero, with his face set toward yet
+stranger scenes...?
+
+"Come," said her father, who was close by, between the horse-block and
+the syringa-bushes, "Albert isn't the only soldier on the battle-field.
+Look at Tom, here!"
+
+Althea turned her eyes dutifully toward her stalwart brother, who
+humorously put up his stiffened fingers to the stiff brim of his hat;
+and then she looked back at Albert.
+
+
+III
+
+McComas's bank, like others, put its office-machinery at the disposal of
+the Government, when the first war-loan was in the making. It seemed a
+small matter, at the beginning, but administrative organization was
+taxed and clerical labors piled up hugely as the big, slow event moved
+along through its various stages. This work in itself came almost to
+seem an adequate contribution to the cause; surely in the mere
+percentage of interest offered there was little to appeal to the
+financial public, except perhaps the depositors of savings banks.
+McComas himself felt no promptings to subscribe to this loan; but his
+directors thought that a reasonable degree of participation was
+"indicated." The bank's name went down, with the names of some others;
+and the clerks who had been working over hours on the new and exacting
+minutiae of the undertaking were given a chance to divert their savings
+toward the novel securities. The bank displayed the Nation's flag, and
+the flags of some of the allies. It all made a busy corner. McComas
+thought of his son in khaki, and felt himself warming daily as a
+patriot.
+
+"We can do them up," he declared. The war, with him, was still largely a
+matter of financial pressure. The pressure, even if exerted at long
+range, was bound to tell. Many of "our boys" would never get "over
+there" at all. They were learning how to safeguard our country's future
+within our country itself.
+
+His wife, who had been flitting from veranda to veranda in their
+pleasant suburban environment, and been doing, with other ladies of her
+circle, some desultory work for the wounded soldiers of the future, now
+came down to the centre of the town and took up the work in good
+earnest. She saw Tom McComas as a seasoned adult who could look after
+himself, but her own Albert was still a boy. It was easy to see him
+freezing, soaking, falling, lying in distress. She busied herself behind
+a great plate-glass window on a frequented thoroughfare--a window heaped
+with battered helmets and emptied shells that drew the idle curiosity or
+the poignant interest of the passer-by. Bandages, sweaters, iodine-tubes
+filled her thoughts and her hands. And Althea, in company with several
+sprightly and entertaining young girls of her own set, began to pick up
+some elementary notions in nursing.
+
+"Why, it's the most delightfully absorbing thing I've ever done!" she
+declared. A new world was dawning--a red world that not all of us have
+been fated to meet so young.
+
+Raymond Prince saw all these preparations and took them as a spectacle.
+He was now frankly but an onlooker in life, and he gazed at big things
+from their far rim. He had no spare funds to put into federal hands, and
+felt by no means able to afford the conversion of any of his few
+remaining investments with a loss of nearly half his present returns. He
+viewed a patriotic parade or two from the curbstone and attended now
+and then some patriotic meeting in the public parks--a flag-raising, for
+example. On these occasions he preferred to stand at some remove, so
+that it would be unnecessary to raise his hat: the requirement of a
+formal salute made him distressingly self-conscious. Yet he was
+displeased if other men, no nearer, failed to lift theirs; and he would
+be indignant when young fellows, engaged in games near by, gave the
+exercises no heed at all.
+
+In one of the parades the flag of France went by. This was a picturesque
+and semi-exotic event; it stirred some memories of early days abroad,
+and Raymond, with an effort, did, stiffly and with an obvious (even an
+obtrusive) self-consciousness, manage to get off his hat. A highly vocal
+young man alongside looked at this cold and creaking manoeuvre with
+disapproval, even disgust.
+
+"Can't you holler?" he asked.
+
+No, Raymond could not "holler." The dead hand of conscious propriety was
+upon him, checking any momentum that might lead to a spontaneous
+expression of patriotic feeling. The generous human juices could not
+run--could not even get started. When he said good-bye to Albert, it was
+not as to a son, nor even to a friend's son. Albert himself might have
+objected to any emotional expression that was too clearly to be seen;
+but he would have welcomed one which, cloaked in an unembarrassing
+obscurity, might at least have been felt. Johnny McComas frankly let
+himself "go," not only with Tom, but with Albert too. Albert could not
+but think within himself that it was all somewhat overdone; he was a bit
+abashed, even if not quite shamefaced. But the recollection of Johnny's
+warm hand-clasp and vibrant voice sometimes came to comfort him, in camp
+across the water, at times when the picture of his own father's chill
+adieux brought little aid.
+
+
+IV
+
+A few brief months ended the foreign service of both our young men.
+Albert came home invalided, and Tom McComas along with others, lay dead
+between the opposing lines of trenches. His father would not, at first,
+credit the news. His son's very strength and vigor had helped build up
+his own exuberant optimism. It simply could not be; his son, his only
+remaining son, a happy husband, a gratified parent.... But the truth
+bore in, as the truth will, and McComas had his days of
+rebellious--almost of blasphemous--protest. The proud monument at
+Roselands was taking a cruel toll. His other son was commemorated on the
+third side of its base; but though a fresh unfrayed flag waved for
+months over turf below which no one lay, it was long before that great
+granite block came to betray to the world this latest and cruelest
+bereavement.
+
+Albert, whose injuries had made him appear as likely to be a useless
+piece on the board for longer than the army surgeons thought worth
+while, was sent back home and made his convalescence under the care of
+his mother; within her house, indeed--for his father had no quarters to
+offer him. Among McComas's flower-beds and garden-paths he enjoyed the
+ministrations of a physician other and better than any that practices on
+those fields of hate--one who complemented the prosaic physical cares
+required for the body with an affluent stream of healing directed toward
+both mind and heart. He had come back to be a hero to Althea, with
+evidences of his heroism graved on his own bruised form.
+
+"Hasn't he been wonderful!" said Althea to her girl friends; and Albert
+volunteered few concrete facts that might qualify or detract from her
+ideal.
+
+Those few months comprised his contribution to the cause. He mended more
+rapidly than might have been expected, and soon began to feel the
+resurgence of those belligerencies which are proper to the nature of the
+healthy young male. But his belligerencies were not at all militaristic.
+He had seen war at short range, knew what it was, and desired it no
+more. He meant to let loose his energies, as soon as might be, in that
+other warfare, business; it would be after the manner of a
+great-grandfather of whom a tradition persisted, and after the close
+pattern of a McComas still before his eyes. A hero, if they wished; but
+a hero with money in his pocket.
+
+Meanwhile, McComas looked at his grandson and writhed. So many openings,
+so many things to be done; yet what future aid had he to count on for
+carrying along his line and for reaping the opportunities in his field?
+A child of four, in rompers, pushing a little wheelbarrow of pebbles
+along garden-paths. The years dragged. It was all too great an irony.
+
+He sent for Albert. Albert still limped a little, but it was not to be
+for long.
+
+"You've done enough for your country," he declared with blunt emphasis.
+"Now do something for me. You're almost well?"
+
+"I think so."
+
+"You want to pitch in?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"You want to amount to something?" continued McComas, pausing on the
+edge of an invidious bit of characterization.
+
+"Of course."
+
+"You would like to come with me?"
+
+"Yes." Surely his own father could not help him to a future.
+
+"Well, take your choice. What do you want? Bank?"
+
+But Albert had heard something about banks. Bank clerks, in these
+close-knit days, when anybody who fell out of the lock-step was lost,
+were but a sort of financial militia. Even if he were pushed along with
+the friendliest zeal, it might be years before he reached the place and
+the end desired. Nor had he much more fondness for growing up under the
+eye of McComas than under that of his own father.
+
+"Bank?" repeated McComas.
+
+"No."
+
+McComas grinned. It was the grin he used when greatly pleased.
+
+"One of those Western concerns?"
+
+"Yes," said Albert; "send me West."
+
+When Raymond heard that Albert had cast in his lot with McComas and
+meant soon to leave for Colorado, he winced. Albert, to him, was still a
+boy, and this term in the West but another kind of schooling. "Just as
+his mother tried to influence him before," said Raymond to me bitterly,
+"so McComas will influence him now." And I could not deny that McComas
+had the whip hand. The unintermittency of business correspondence, the
+cogency of a place on the payroll....
+
+No, it was not to be denied that Raymond had lost Albert finally.
+
+And Althea went to the train, to see him off--as to another war.
+
+
+V
+
+"Finally"--perhaps I have used the word too soon.
+
+I dropped in on Raymond, one evening, at his private hotel. It was about
+four months after Albert's departure for the West. His quarters seemed
+as snugly comfortable as ever, and as completely adapted to his
+ultimately discovered personality and its peculiar requirements. Raymond
+master of a big house! Raymond leading a public life!
+
+But he himself was perturbed. It was a letter from Albert--it was two or
+three letters, in fact.
+
+"He says he is going to marry her."
+
+"Her?"
+
+"Althea. Althea McComas."
+
+Albert, in the West, had done well. He had taken hold immediately,
+decisively. The initiative which would never have developed under his
+father had been liberated during his war service and was now mounting to
+a still higher pitch among the mountains.
+
+"He is going to do," McComas had told me, after the second month. "He is
+a wonder," he had said, later.
+
+Be that as it may. McComas was doubtless inclined to the favorable view.
+He had determined in advance that Albert was to succeed. Albert was
+meeting, successfully, known expectations of success--as a young man
+may.
+
+"He started so well," said his father. "And now...."
+
+"And now?"
+
+"Now he wants to marry the daughter of a stable-boy!"
+
+"Raymond," I said; "drop the 'stable-boy.' That was never true; and if
+it were it would have no relevancy here and now."
+
+"I should say not! Why, Albert--"
+
+"You have told him? He knows your--He knows the--the legend?"
+
+"He does. And as you see, it makes no difference to him."
+
+"Why should it? Why should he care for early matters that were over and
+past long years before he was born? He sees what he sees. He feels what
+he feels."
+
+"He feels McComas."
+
+"Why shouldn't he? Who wouldn't?"
+
+Raymond relapsed into a moody silence. I saw, presently, that he was
+trying to break from it. He had another consideration to offer.
+
+"And then," he began, "about--his mother. He must have
+understood--something. He must know--by now."
+
+"Know?" I returned. "If he does, he has the advantage over all the rest
+of us. _I_ don't 'know.' _You_ don't 'know.' Neither does anybody else.
+Another old matter--as well rectified as society and its usages can
+manage, and best left alone."
+
+"Well, it's--it's indelicate. Albert ought to feel that."
+
+"Raymond!" I protested. "We must leave it to the young to smooth over
+the rough old places and to salve the aching old sores. That's their
+great use and function."
+
+"Not Albert's," he said stubbornly. "I don't want him to do it, and I
+don't want it done in that way."
+
+Another silence. I could see that he was gathering force for still
+another objection.
+
+"It's a desertion," said the undying egoist. "It's a piece of treachery.
+It's a going over to the enemy."
+
+"If you mean McComas, Albert went over months ago. And he doesn't seem
+to have lost anything by doing so," I ventured to add.
+
+"This marriage would clinch it, would confirm it. I should lose him at
+last, and completely, just as I have lost--everything."
+
+"Raymond," I could scarcely keep from saying, "you deceive yourself. You
+have really never cared for Albert at all. The only concern here is your
+own pride--the futile working of a will that is too weak to get its own
+way."
+
+But I kept silence, and he continued the silence. Yet I felt that he
+was gathering force for the greatest objection of all.
+
+"I have heard them spoken of," he said, after a little, "as--as brother
+and sister. For them to marry! It's unseemly."
+
+"Raymond!" I protested again, with even more vigor than before. "Why
+must you say a thing like that?"
+
+"The same father and mother--now. Living together--going about together
+as members of one family.... They did, you know."
+
+"Yes, for a few weeks in the year. 'One family'? What is the mere label?
+Nothing. What is the real situation? Everything. Of blood-relationship
+not a trace. Why, even cousins marry--but here are two strains
+absolutely different.... Have you," I asked, "have you brought up this
+point with--Albert?"
+
+Raymond glanced at the letters.
+
+"You have! And he says what I say!"
+
+Raymond put the letters away.
+
+Albert had doubtless said much more--and said it with the vigor of
+indignant youth.
+
+
+VI
+
+At a wedding the father of the bridegroom need not be conspicuous--least
+of all when the wedding takes place in a church. He may avoid, better
+than at a home wedding, too close contact with the various units of the
+bridal party. In view of such considerations, Raymond Prince was able to
+be present, with discomfort minimized, at his son's marriage.
+
+We attended, too, of course. My wife has a woman's fondness for
+weddings--and so has our Elsie.
+
+It came in June. The church was _the_ church--the church with the elms
+and ash-trees around it, the triangular lawn with the hydrangeas and
+elderberry-bushes blossoming here and there, and the gardens and
+plantations of private wealth looking across from all sides; the church
+where everybody who is anybody gets married as a matter of course--at
+that time of year; the church which has plenty of room for limousines on
+both sides of its converging streets, and on a third cross-street close
+by; the church which has the popular and sympathetic rector, who has
+known you ever since you were a boy (or girl), the competent organist,
+and the valiant surpliced choir (valiant though small); the church
+which, under its broad squat tower and low spire, possesses, about its
+altar-rail, room for many palms and rubber-plants and for as many
+bridesmaids and ushers as the taste of the high contracting parties may
+require:--a space reached by a broad flight of six or seven steps, and
+wide enough for any deployment, high enough for the whole assemblage to
+see, and grand enough (with its steps and all) to make a considerable
+effect when the first notes of the Wedding March sound forth and the
+newly wedded couple walk down and out into married life.
+
+"Be married in your uniform!" Johnny McComas had said effusively.
+
+"Well, I'm not in the service, now...." replied Albert.
+
+"You have been, haven't you? Haven't you?" Johnny repeated, as if there
+could be two answers.
+
+"Why, I was only a private...." Albert submitted.
+
+"So were lots of other good fellows."
+
+"It's soiled," said Albert. "There's a stain on the shoulder."
+
+"All the better. We've done something for the country. Let those people
+know it."
+
+So Albert walked down the aisle in khaki.
+
+Althea was in white--my wife named the material expertly. She wore a
+long veil. There were flower-girls, too,--my wife knew their names.
+
+"She's the most beautiful bride I ever saw!" my wife declared. "This is
+the most beautiful wedding I ever attended!" She always says that.
+
+Johnny McComas was in white, too. As he stood beside the bridal pair he
+seemed almost too festive, too estival, too ebullient for this poor
+earth of ours. His wife, whose costume I will not describe and whose
+state of mind I shall not explore, showed a subdued sedateness--though a
+glad--which restored the balance.
+
+Raymond Prince saw the ceremony from one of the back pews. If he
+attended the out-of-door reception at the house, it must have been but
+briefly: I quite missed him there. For him the wedding proper had been
+less a ceremony than a parade. I can fancy how he resented the
+organist's grand outburst and the triumphal descent (undeniably
+effective) of the bridal party over those six or seven steps. Again he
+was an unregarded and negligible spectator. I presume he missed Johnny's
+hand in Albert's, and Johnny's pressure on Albert's shoulder--the one
+with the stain; and I hope he did. It was the hand of the stronger,
+taking possession. "My prop, my future mainstay!" said Johnny's action.
+
+And it was as an unregarded and negligible spectator--now his permanent
+role--that Raymond Prince took the slow train back to town.
+
+
+THE END
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The Riverside Press
+CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
+U . S . A
+
+
+
+
+
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