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

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