Gods Men

3

IN MID-AUGUST THE NEWSPAPER headlines had announced the end of the siege in Peking, and a cablegram from Dr. Lane brought the news that he intended to stay. The Imperial Court had fled, and the Old Empress had wailed aloud her hardships. She had not even been given time to comb her hair, and her breakfast on the day of the flight had been only a hard-boiled egg.

“Serves her right,” Mrs. Lane said briskly. “Well, William, it looks as though I’d have to go back to your father. But you’ll be able to manage by yourself if I get your clothes ready before I go.”

William went to Cambridge for his final examinations in September. He had missed the preliminaries but Mrs. Lane had herself gone to the dean with a certificate signed by the headmaster of the Chefoo Boys’ School. She had so talked and persuaded and demanded that the dean was much impressed and granted her son a certain clemency, and William was admitted conditionally. He was confident that whatever promises his mother had made to the dean, he could in the course of four years fulfill. Indeed, he preferred not to know all that his mother had said and done for him. Thus he did not know, though he suspected, that the admirable arrangement he had made with Mr. Cameron to be Jeremy’s roommate, and when necessary his tutor, had taken shape first in the active brain of his mother.

Mrs. Lane, before she went back to China, had chosen a final Sunday afternoon to call upon Mr. and Mrs. Cameron. She had grown friendly if not intimate with them during the summer when William had gone almost every afternoon to play tennis at the house on top of the cliff. He had asked her to call upon Mrs. Cameron, stipulating that neither of his sisters nor his grandmother was to go with her.

“The Camerons are the kind of people I belong with,” he had explained. “I want them to know I have a mother I need not be ashamed of. Nobody else matters.”

Mrs. Lane was touched. “Thank you, dear.”

The formal call had gone off well, and Mrs. Cameron had explained that she must be forgiven if she could not return it, since in the summer she made no calls. Mrs. Lane and William were, however, invited to dinner within the month. After the evening pleasantly spent by Mrs. Lane talking about the Empress Dowager and the magnificence of Peking, it had occurred to the indomitable mother that a problem which had been worrying her much could now be solved. In spite of all her efforts, it was clear that William would be compelled to earn money somehow during college, and she could not imagine how this was to be done. She had inquired of the dean, and he had suggested waiting on table or washing dishes. This suggestion she had accepted with seeming gratitude but she knew it was impossible. William would not wait upon anyone nor would he wash dishes. It would be impossible to make him. She remembered the delightful evening in the great seaside house. It was a pity, she had thought, that the heir to all the wealth was only a pale sickly boy. William would so have enjoyed it, would have been so able to spend it well, looking handsome and princely all the while. She had thought deeply for some weeks, and had at last decided to call one last time upon the Camerons. She wrote a short note to Mrs. Cameron, was grateful for all the kindnesses of the summer, mentioned her impending return to China and how she feared to leave her boy so new and friendless here, and asked permission to come and say good-by. When Mrs. Cameron telephoned her to say they would be at home on a certain Sunday, thither she went, at five o’clock.

The butler ushered her into the drawing room, where Mrs. Cameron sat doing nothing while Mr. Cameron read the Transcript.

“Do sit down,” Mrs. Cameron said, and made a graceful motion with her ringed left hand.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Lane replied.

She had spent a good deal of thought upon her costume for this occasion. It should be plain, but not poor. It must convey good taste and a civilized mind.

Knowing the ready impatience of the rich, she had begun upon her theme as soon as Mr. Cameron put down his paper to greet her.

“Don’t let me interrupt your reading,” she said. “I have come for a very few minutes to say good-by — and for one more purpose. It is about William.”

“What’s the matter with William?” Mr. Cameron inquired.

“He has always done very well in school,” Mrs. Lane said. “We expect that. His father was graduated from Harvard summa cum laude. No, the concern is in my own heart. William is so young, so lonely. He has no one to take his parents’ place. His grandparents, my father and mother, are old and they can scarcely understand him. They have the responsibility of the girls, too. My husband’s parents are dead and the family scattered. If I could feel that William would be able to look to you and Mrs. Cameron for guidance — through Jeremy—”

“He can always come here,” Mrs. Cameron said in a mild voice. “I’m sure there is plenty of room.”

Mrs. Lane sighed. “Thank you, dear Mrs. Cameron. I dread the long vacations. His father says he must work and earn part of his way, but what does William know about such things?”

“It won’t hurt him to work,” Mr. Cameron said.

Mrs. Lane agreed quickly. “That is just what his father says, and I am sure you are both right. Please, Mr. Cameron, for the first summer at least, could you help to find something suitable for my boy, something that will not lead him into bad company? He doesn’t know his own American people yet.”

“Oh well,” Mr. Cameron said. “I can do that. There are always jobs waiting for young men, if they are the right sort. I supported myself entirely after I was fifteen, as a matter of fact.”

Mrs. Lane proceeded bravely to the most difficult part of her purpose.

“I am going to ask something really bold, dear Mr. Cameron. Do you think that William could be useful somehow to your son? Could he not perhaps look after him, help him even with his lessons? When — if, of course — he should be ill, William could look out for him, you know — go to his classes and take notes for him — that sort of thing.”

Mrs. Lane was faltering under Roger Cameron’s stern eyes, and she looked pleadingly at Mrs. Cameron for relief. To her joy she saw a mild approval there.

“It might be a good idea, Roger,” Mrs. Cameron said.

“William’s a proud sort of fellow,” Roger replied.

“Not too proud to help his friend,” Mrs. Lane said. “William is a Christian boy, Mr. Cameron.”

Roger pursed his lips. “How much do you expect me to pay him?”

Mrs. Lane knew her battle was over. She shook her head and folded her hands in her lap. “Please don’t ask me that, Mr. Cameron. I trust your judgment — and your generosity. I wish there need be no talk of money — it’s so dreadful. Had my husband remained in this country instead of choosing poverty upon the mission field … but no matter!” She smiled sadly and changed the subject. After ten minutes of lively talk made up of news from her husband’s recent letters, she rose to say good-by. She clasped Mrs. Cameron’s hand between both her own and smiled bravely. “I cannot tell you how safe I feel now about William. I leave him in your care, dear friends.”

Mr. and Mrs. Cameron bowed, still looking a little bewildered. When the door had closed they sat down again exactly as they were before and Mr. Cameron picked up the Transcript. Neither of them spoke for a few minutes, and Mrs. Cameron gazed out of the window into the garden.

“It is a good thing that William Lane is so handsome,” she said at last. “We really won’t mind having him about. Candy says he is clever. I do hope he will always be good to Jeremy. Sometimes I think there is something cruel about his mouth. His hands are small for such a tall boy. Have you noticed that? I always think small hands mean cruelty in a man.”

She did not speak often but when she did a little rush of words came from her lips, as though reserve had temporarily been removed.

Mr. Cameron listened, still reading the paper. “It won’t hurt Jeremy to have a strong young fellow around to keep him lively.”

Mrs. Cameron did not reply for some little time. Then she said, “As for vacations, you must not forget that Candace is also in the house. The two of them, both being so healthy, will want to play games together. … I shouldn’t at all like her to marry the son of a missionary.”

“Candy will marry whom she pleases,” Mr. Cameron said. He loved his daughter and was proud of her, though with steady pessimism. Sooner or later the young always betrayed the old.

“Do keep quiet, there’s a good girl,” he went on. “This Bryan is putting me into a state, even on Sunday. He’ll be the death of us all, talking about the Philippines. What does he know about those foreigners over there?”

Mrs. Cameron fell silent, and Mr. Cameron read the paper with fury, chewing the yellowed ends of his mustache.

The examinations were easily passed, for which William was grateful to the hard grueling of English schoolmasters. He was practical enough to realize that he could also thank his own talents and ambition. It was intolerable for him not to do well and so he did well. When Mr. Cameron had asked him to come and see him, one day after his mother had sailed for China, he went with some excitement within, although with entire calm upon his surface. His mother had told him, not quite truthfully perhaps, what Mr. Cameron would talk about.

“He has some idea that you might be a sort of tutor for Jeremy,” she had said that last day. “Don’t get proud and refuse it, William. Remember the alternative is dishwashing or waiting on the college tables. Besides, no one need know. You will simply be Jeremy’s roommate and you will have the chance to live in those beautiful rooms. I don’t think I could get you in there otherwise.”

The beautiful rooms, he had already discovered, were on that short and noble street called the Gold Coast. There the sons of the wealthy lived like young princes in suites of rooms with separate bedrooms, a private bath, and a shared living room. Anything less seemed impossible to William. He made up his mind that he would accept whatever Mr. Cameron offered.

He was pleasantly grateful, then, when the offer was made.

“I leave it to you,” Mr. Cameron said, “to see how you can help my boy. You know him pretty well now, don’t you?”

“I think so,” William said, and he added quite sincerely, “at least I like him more than any boy I’ve ever known.”

“That’s good,” Mr. Cameron said with more heartiness than usual. “Then you can help him, I guess. Keep him cheerful, you know — that’s very important. We don’t believe in medication. It’s very important to believe in the power of mind over matter.”

“Yes, sir,” William said.

“Now,” Mr. Cameron went on. “Will a hundred dollars a month be about right?”

“Whatever you say, sir,” William replied. He was startled by the amount, but he would not show his amazement.

“Well, if you find it isn’t enough you can let me know,” Mr. Cameron said. “And look here, one more thing, what say we keep this little arrangement to ourselves? It might make Jeremy feel queer with you. He’s democratic and all that.”

“You mean just you and me, sir?” He thought of Candace. He did not want her to know that her father was paying him.

“Just us,” Mr. Cameron said. “Of course, Mrs. Cameron knows the general idea, but she won’t say anything if I tell her not to, and she isn’t interested in details.”

“I’d like it,” William said. “That is, sir, I’d like to forget it myself, so that I won’t be thinking of money in connection with Jeremy.”

“No, no,” Mr. Cameron said, quite pleased.

“I’ll just ask him if he will let me room with him,” William suggested.

“That’s right,” Mr. Cameron said. “You fix it up and on the first of every month there’ll be a check.”

The outcome of this was that when the two young men entered college, William found himself on the Gold Coast, with a bedroom of his own across the pleasant living room from Jeremy’s. Mrs. Cameron came with them and spent a week furnishing the rooms properly. There was even a small grand piano for Jeremy to use. William, secure in the monthly check, spent the money his mother had left him to buy himself a few luxuries that she had not been able to persuade the agitated mission treasurer to include in his necessities, a handsome set of razors, some silk pajamas, a blue brocaded satin dressing gown and leather slippers to match.

Thus William began his four years of college. He was reserved, modest, and dignified, and took his work with secret seriousness, though outward ease. He fulfilled exactly his every obligation to Jeremy and was at once kind and stern. He felt sometimes that Jeremy did not like him but he did not allow this to disturb him. The brilliance of his own academic standing was answer enough. Among the hundreds of young men who were matriculated at Harvard that year, William was notable. In prudence he made no close friends as the months passed, but he surveyed the Gold Coast carefully. It did not occur to him to search for friends outside that bright area. He marked here and there men whom he might cultivate as time went on. There was plenty of time.

Nevertheless, by Christmas he had approached a classmate who attracted him above all others, a handsome fellow who lived in Westmorly, too careless to be ambitious for high marks with his professors, too self-confident to consider marks of first importance. He had already his group of friends, in the upper classes as well as among the freshmen, for he had prepared at Groton. He did many things well. He sang in the freshman glee club, he was a fine oarsman, and he was already marked for those clubs which William exceedingly desired to enter. Franklin Roosevelt was the man, William told himself, that he would like to have been, his father rich and his mother secure in her place in American society. Having everything, the gay and handsome boy could say what he liked, could believe as he felt, behave as he willed. In the election that autumn he was for Bryan, although his own cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, was running for vice-president, and he flouted England by raising money for the Boers. It was this high-handedness that won William’s notice. He could not have taken sides against England even though he could not approve the Boers, or disapprove the English, and he envied the ease with which it seemed that Franklin did both, without liking the Boers or disliking the English. For some reason which William could not comprehend, there seemed to be such an overflow in this youth, such a limitless privilege, that he made a habit of believing that the poor, the uneducated, the miserable must be championed, although without hatred of the oppressor.

William knew nothing of South Africa. That he might prove to himself at least that the man he unwillingly admired was wrong he began for the first time in his life to read newspapers and to perceive though dimly, how omnipotent they were. Even he was dependent upon them to shape his own opinions about the war. He was convinced from what he read that England was right and that the Boers were coarse farmers, ignorant dwellers upon the soil. When he announced this opinion, not to Franklin Roosevelt but in his presence, he was answered only by loud though pleasant laughter. His opponent refused to argue. He did not care what William believed.

The tall young man did other things more amazing. He helped the men who lived in the Yard, in the cheap dormitories and in even cheaper rooming houses, and the day students, to organize themselves and win the class elections away from the little group that had always won them.

The Gold Coast inhabitants sneered. “Anything to get himself popular!”

William listened and said little. He was cautious in the world of his own country, still so new to him, and being insecure and unready to take what he felt was his proper part, he hovered near the young Roosevelt who had no doubts and behaved like the prince of a royal house. He made his approach of friendship tentatively slight, a conversation in the dining room at Memorial Hall, a chance to walk together to separate classrooms. Roosevelt answered without assuming superiority and was mildly interested to hear of William’s birth in China. His own grandfather had made his fortune in China and his grandmother in her twenties had visited the fashionable parts of Hong Kong and Canton.

Upon this slight interest William built his hopes. Of all the young men he knew or saw, this one was most nearly his equal, most fitted for friendship. Why that friendship did not grow, why the hoped for companionship faded, William never knew. It was a bud that did not bloom. Franklin Roosevelt’s greetings were carelessly kind, but he had no time. There was never a time for talk, no time for companionship, and William, too sensitive, withdrew into cold and secret criticism. He was reminded of the English days in the Chefoo school. Because he was not allowed to love, he took shelter again in hatred. The fellow, he told himself, wanted to run the college. When both of them were chosen for the staff of the college newspaper, the Crimson, William felt himself freeze toward the young man who was still too happy to notice him.

On a cold day in January in William’s sophomore year, his father stood on the balcony of Mr. Fong’s bookshop. Dr. Lane knew Peking well, and the day before he had walked along the street judging each house for its view of the Great North Gate, through which on this day, the seventh day of the Western first month, the Old Empress with her Imperial Court was to return to the palace. Dr. Lane did not know Mr. Fong and it was by the merest chance that he saw above this bookshop the narrow balcony to which one must climb by a ladder since it was merely a façade upon the roof. From it, however, was the best possible view of the great event of tomorrow.

Dr. Lane went into the bookshop and bowed to Mr. Fong, who stood behind the counter reading an old book he had bought from the library of a man recently dead. Since the man had no sons and none of the females of the house could read, there was no more use for a library.

“What can I do for you, Elder Brother?” Mr. Fong inquired. He was polite to all foreigners because, being a good man, he was sorry for everything that had happened. While he could not say that he was glad that his country was defeated, for he put no more trust in foreign governments than in his own, yet he grieved that foreigners and Chinese had been killed.

Especially was he ashamed of the folly of the Old Woman who had put her faith in the society of ignorant men called Boxers. She deserved the catastrophe that had befallen her when she had been compelled to flee the city in such haste, seventeen months ago. So impetuous had been the Court’s flight, as Mr. Fong heard, that more people had been killed by the Imperial Guard in getting the Old Buddha out of the city than the foreign soldiers had killed when they came in. It was over at last, to the disgrace of all concerned, and pity to those dead, both Chinese and foreign, and especially the little children, and Mr. Fong was polite at the sight of a foreign face now that it was safe to be friendly.

Dr. Lane replied with equal politeness. “I wish to rent a few feet of your excellent balcony tomorrow in order that I may see the return of the Empress Dowager.”

Mr. Fong was surprised. “Elder Brother, are you and the elder brothers of your country pleased to see her return?”

“At least I am,” Dr. Lane said. “I believe that the people need their government and I have every hope that the Empress will have learned her lesson and that she will allow the young Emperor to put in reforms.”

“Western elder brothers have more faith in women than we have,” Mr. Fong replied. “Whether Elder Brother is right I do not know and it is always likely that I am wrong. I could not take money for the balcony. Pray use it as though it were your own.”

After some minutes of such talk, Mr. Fong finally accepted two taels of silver, which was not too much since the foreigners were eagerly buying whatever space they could find. Chinese would not of course be allowed to see the royal return. All doors were to be barred, all windows closed, and blue cotton curtains were even now being hung across side streets and alleyways, so that no common eye could look upon the Old Buddha. Foreigners could not be thus controlled since they were the victors in the brief war.

“You know, Elder Brother,” Mr. Fong remarked when the transaction was over, “I feel more than usually unhappy to take silver from you because I had once in this house a clever small brother of your people.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes,” Mr. Fong said, stroking his sparse beard. “He came to teach my son a foreign language. He did not take money for pay. Instead he asked for my foreign books, of which I have a few. Servants steal such books from their foreign masters to sell for a few coins, and that is how I got them.”

“Who was this foreign boy?” Dr. Lane asked.

“You remember the god-man who was killed, he and his wife and children? The one who was always begging for bread?”

“I do, indeed,” Dr. Lane said. He remembered very well that the Miller family had been found lying in their own blood, but the boy was not there, nor had he ever been heard of, although the American officials had made efforts to trace him.

“The boy was here,” Mr. Fong said solemnly. He tapped his polished wooden counter with his long fingernail. “Here he was in my house. He came early to teach my son. Thus he escaped death. Surely there was meaning in it. I have considered it a good omen for my house.”

“What became of him?” Dr. Lane asked with intense interest.

“He came back,” Mr. Fong said. “And he told me what he had found in his own house. He stayed with us until he was able to escape. Then I told him to go east to the sea and to find a foreign ship and to return to his own land and his father’s father’s house.”

“That was very good of you,” Dr. Lane said. “I shall report this to the American officials.”

“Please do not do so,” Mr. Fong said hastily. “It is better not to tell anyone so long as the Old Woman is alive. She will come back smiling, as you will see tomorrow, but who will know what is in her heart?”

Who indeed could know? Dr. Lane himself would never wholly recover from the long siege within the Legation Quarters. He had caught dysentery in the heat of that summer, and was nearly dead when at last the soldiers from the West came surging into the city. When his wife came back to him from America, after William was safely in college, she had tried to make him give up China.

“Surely, Henry, you have done enough.”

“I have done nothing yet,” he replied. It was the beginning of the long struggle between them over whether China was worth his life.

“See how many foreigners have been killed!” she had cried passionately.

“Hundreds of us have been saved, and by six men,” he had retorted.

It was true. Junglu, the favorite of the Empress Dowager, had done all he could to save the foreigners from her fury. Yuan-cheng and Hsu Ching-cheng had deliberately changed the word “slay,” in the royal edict, to “protect.” Li-shao, Liu-yuan, and Hsu Tung-i the Empress had put to death for opposing the war against the foreigners. And there were the noble host, those whom he never forgot, the thousands of Chinese Christians, more than two score of them of his own church here in Peking, who had refused to give up their faith and who died, martyrs for a god who to them was a foreign one.

No, Dr. Lane told himself steadfastly, it was beyond his wife’s power, strong woman though she was, to move him from his own faith, not only in God but in the Chinese people.

“I will be here tomorrow,” he promised Mr. Fong.

Thus on the next day Dr. Lane stood upon the balcony, wrapped in a thick quilted Chinese robe inside of which he still shivered. Mrs. Lane had refused to stand there with him, when looking out from the window of their bedroom this morning, she had seen the city shrouded in yellow dust from the deserts of the northwest. A bitter wind was blowing, even then. Dr. Lane had been slightly exasperated to perceive it, for it added to the honor of the Imperial return. It was an ancient tradition in the city that whenever an emperor left his palace a strong wind would go with him, and would bring him back again. Heaven itself seemed to be on the side of the Old Buddha.

While he waited on the balcony in the fury of the cold wind Dr. Lane thought of what Mr. Fong had told him. The Miller boy had doubtless done exactly what his Chinese friend had bade him. He might now be safely in America. He must write and tell William of the possibility. He had reported the story to the American officials yesterday, concealing Mr. Fong’s name.

He glanced with concern at the great gate. There was still no sign of the royal entourage. Helen had been wise, perhaps, to content herself with seeing the Empress at the mighty reception which she was to give to her conquerors when she reached the Imperial Palace. Yet he did not want to attend it. He was not dazzled by her arrogant and heathen splendor. He hoped to see her as she came in the North Gate and to discern for himself whether she had repented. He had prayed solemnly that her heart might be softened for the good of the people. He did not honestly know whether such prayers were answered.

Everything was in readiness for the moment at the gate. Across the city the wide street had been cleared of all venders and stalls and booths. The street had been swept clean and spread with bright yellow sand, yellow, the imperial color. No common man was on the street. The imperial guard stood waiting, and princes and dukes were ready each with his own banner corps. Here and there down the street foreigners stood at windows, a few opened by permission that the visitors might witness the return.

Mr. Fong’s head appeared above the edge of the ladder. He held out a small brass handstove. “Take this, Elder Brother,” he whispered. “I have put fresh coals in it.”

Dr. Lane took the handstove gratefully and before he could speak his thanks Mr. Fong was gone. Now he perceived certain signs. A line of Chinese heads would appear here and there over a rooftop, instantly to disappear again. Word was running through the city that the Old Buddha was near. She had descended from the train. For the first time in her life the Old Buddha had ridden on a train, and with her, her court. She had not enjoyed it. The dust had been suffocating, the noise insupportable. When the whistle blew she had been terrified and indignant, and when she learned that this was the duty of the engineer she sent word by a eunuch that he was not to blow it without telling her before he did it. The railway from Paoting to Peking had been destroyed during the war and rebuilt again under the foreign victors and the foreign soldiers had brought it into the very heart of the city, tearing great holes in the walls.

The Old Buddha would not pass through these desecrated walls. She had ordered the court to alight outside and to enter their royal palanquins, that they might return to the city in proper state through the great gate.

Dr. Lane, holding the little handstove, heard a rising shout. A small army of eunuchs on horseback galloped from the gate. They wore black caps with red feathers and on the breasts of their robes were huge medallions of red and yellow embroidery. Behind them came the imperial herald, crying in a high voice that the Imperial Court was returned. All those officials waiting on the street fell to their knees and bowed their faces into the dust. Dr. Lane leaned on the frail banisters of the balcony and stared down into the street, and the destiny of this moment was impressed upon him. He watched everything, intent to remember it all, to tell William. He saw the Imperial Guard, followed by military officers. Great flags of yellow satin swirled in the wind, and upon each was embroidered a blue dragon swallowing a red sun. On either side of the flags were the imperial banners embroidered with the imperial arms.

Behind these rode the young Emperor, a sad young man, sitting within his yellow palanquin, which was lined with blue silk. The curtain was up and there he sat, his face unmoved, gazing straight ahead. He sat upon his crossed feet in the position of a Buddha.

“The sacrifice of youth,” Dr. Lane murmured to nobody. Death was already clear upon that tragic face.

But death had nothing to do with the Empress herself. He was indignant to see the redoubtable figure, seated in her great palanquin in the midst of her guards, followed by the young Empress and the court ladies. Upon that gay and wicked old visage there was nothing but the liveliest pleasure. Seeing the foreigners, who were her conquerors, she had put aside the curtains of the palanquin and waved her handkerchief at them. He was the more indignant to see some of the foreign ladies, among whom he recognized Americans, too, wave back to the old sinner, laughing as they did so. Thus quickly was all forgot.

He came down from the balcony and returned the handstove to Mr. Fong with thanks.

“How did the Old Woman look?” Mr. Fong inquired.

“She has not repented,” Dr. Lane said grimly.

“Did I not tell you?” Mr. Fong replied and he laughed, though his face was full of rue.

William Lane remembered suddenly in the midst of his preparation for a test in advanced English that he had not read his father’s letter. He had got it in the morning with other letters, one of them from Candace, and hers he had read first. He wanted very much to be in love with Candace, and most of the time now he thought he was. The obstacle to his complete conviction was simple enough — herself. She expected from him a quality of attendance, a constant gallantry, which he found little short of degrading. For a woman to be beautiful was entirely necessary in his eyes. He despised his sister Henrietta for her plain face. Candace was beautiful enough to satisfy him, could he subdue her other less-attractive qualities.

At the moment, however, his relation with Candace was puzzling and exciting. He felt at a disadvantage, there was so much he did not know because he had not always lived in his own country. The secret hostility he had always felt toward his father for compelling him to be born the son of a missionary in China was now rising into a profound and helpless anger. In spite of this he loved his father in a strange half-hating fashion, and some of his darkest moods were those in which he brooded upon what his father might have been had he not heard the unfortunate call of God. Handsome in face, winning in manner, a leader of men, there was no reason, William thought when his fancy was rampant, why his father might not have gone into politics and even become the President of the United States. There was nothing wonderful about Theodore Roosevelt. William spent a good deal of time studying that bumptious angular face. Anybody could be President!

He pulled his father’s letter from his pocket and saving the Chinese stamp for Jeremy, he tore the envelope and took out the sheets of thin paper, lined closely with the delicate and familiar handwriting. He was quite aware that his father always took pains to communicate with him on equal terms, and especially to tell him constantly what was happening in the land that had been left behind. William was too shrewd not to understand these pains. His father dreamed that the dear only son would come back to China, to be a better missionary than anyone had ever been before, to persuade the changing nation toward God. Some day or other, William knew, he would have to destroy this dream, but he had not yet the courage for it. He did not put it in terms of courage. He told himself that he was only waiting for the moment when it would hurt his father least. Now quickly and carelessly he read what his father had written slowly and with care.

I told you of the pending return of the Court. Now it has come. It was a strange and barbaric sight, a motley crowd of rascals ruled over by a feminine tyrant, and yet somehow there was magnificence in it, too, a sort of wild and natural glory, the atmosphere which the Chinese can manage so well in whatever they do. The Old Empress is too great a person, in spite of her monstrous evil, to remain ungenerous. She has acknowledged her defeat, if not her fault, and now she sees that she must begin reforms for the people. Even before the return she issued an edict demanding that the officials of the empire immediately learn all about political science and international law. She has given them six months in which to complete this task, upon pain of death. Six months. There speaks the old ignorance and the new!

Perhaps more exciting, because more practicable, is the fact she has appointed a commission to draft a public school system, the first that China has ever had. Some day the old examinations will be entirely abolished and China will be modern. It may happen before you finish college, dear boy, so that when you come back it will be to another country altogether, one which you can help to build.

But I do not wish to speak only of China. Tell me about yourself at college. What you say of Jeremy seems pleasant and good. What fortune to find such a friend! I had feared loneliness for you. The young can be so cruel to those who have not their exact experience. Give him my warm regards.

Your mother is writing you tomorrow, she says, about the reception which the Old Empress held for all the foreigners. It was a great affair. All the diplomats and their wives went and so far as I can learn from your mother, the Empress behaved exactly as though she had won the war and was graciously meeting her captives and freeing prisoners. So successful was she that a number of ladies capitulated to her frightful charm. I myself refused to go. I could not stomach having to be polite to that female personification of the Evil One. Your mother was not so scrupulous and apparently enjoyed herself.

His father’s letters always took him back to China, however much he might resist. He could see clearly that bold figure of the Old Empress, great enough to accept defeat lightly and so be still imperial, still powerful. There was power in her which William felt was sacred, compelling a quality in himself which might be a similar power. As he grew into manhood to his full height of six feet one, he felt the excitement of his ambition surging into his body and his mind. He was drawn always to the powerful and the proud. Once he had passed the famous president of the university crossing the yard with an enormous watermelon under his arm, and he never felt the same respect again for him. Whatever the genius of Charles Eliot, and William acknowledged genius, it was lessened by the man’s lack of pride. Nothing could have persuaded William to carry even a bundle under his arm.

Indeed, few of his professors fulfilled his secret expectations. It was hard to give high respect to a pudgy philosopher with a big head thatched with rough yellowish gray hair covered with an old tired-looking hat, or a little man with a high forehead and a shaggy disheveled mustache. Two men alone satisfied his instinct for dignity and seriousness. One was a great handsome German who looked like the Kaiser and taught psychology with the voice of a thundering god. The other was a tall slender man, a Spaniard, whose eyes were dark and cold. Under George Santayana alone William sat with complete reverence. The man was an aristocrat.

The same absolute and delicate pride he had seen long ago in the Chinese Empress, a quality which could not stoop to common folk. For William democracy meant no more than that from among the common mass a king might arise, a Carlylean hero, a leader unexplained. People tried to explain such persons by many myths of virgin births and immaculate conceptions. Chinese history, he had often heard his father say, was rich with such myths. The unexplained great men, born of ordinary parents must, the people felt, be the sons of gods.

In the dark depths of his emotions William acknowledged the possibility of explanation. How explain himself? There was no one in his family like him. He could not be explained any more than the Chinese Empress could be, for she was born the daughter of a common small military official. Somewhere in the path of the generations, certain genes met to make the invincible combination. He would never forget the haughty face of the indomitable ruler bent above him, a young American boy. It had been his first glimpse of greatness and it remained in him, a permanent influence.

So William created his world in his own image. The sons of gods were the saviors of mankind and they lived upon the Gold Coast, anywhere in the world.

William folded his father’s letter and saw on the back of the sheet one further note:

By the by, here is something interesting. You remember the Faith Mission family Miller, who were killed by the Boxers. Actually the boy escaped. Quite by accident I met a Chinese who had saved his life and sent him on his way to the coast. From there, if he got a ship, he may have reached America safely — may be there now, under God’s care.

This news did not interest William. That brief and humiliating moment in the dusty Peking street was repulsive even in memory. He crushed the letter in his hand and threw it into the wastepaper basket under the desk.

In William’s junior year he reached his final hatred of Franklin Roosevelt when Roosevelt was chosen president of the Crimson. William had supposed himself secure for the place and he did not know why he had failed. He was not able to bide his disappointment from Jeremy, always quick to feel suffering in anyone else.

“Sorry, William,” Jeremy said. “You would have done a magnificent job.”

“It doesn’t matter,” William said with a grimace.

“Don’t be ashamed of feeling,” Jeremy said gently.

William allowed a few words to escape from his vast inner misery. “It seems unjust that I shouldn’t get it, and that fellow got it so easily.”

He saw Jeremy looking at him with a peculiar and pitying gaze and he averted his eyes.

“I’d like to say something to you, William, if you’ll let me,” Jeremy said after a moment.

“Well?” William heard his own voice harsh.

“Perhaps we can’t say such things to each other. We never have, somehow. Perhaps if we could we would both feel better.”

“Say what you like,” William said. He sat down abruptly at the desk and pretended to fill his fountain pen with ink.

“Roosevelt has got everything he wanted because he is warm toward everybody. He is full of a sort of — of — love, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” William said. “He is full of loose ideas, so far as I am concerned.”

“I know some of his ideas are crazy,” Jeremy admitted. “But everything else about him is so right that he can just about think as he likes.”

William dropped the pen and it fell on the floor. His gray eyes were furious under his black brows and his lips tightened. “I suppose you mean his father is rich, his mother is socially correct, they live on the right street, all the sort of things that I haven’t!”

“You know I don’t mean that,” Jeremy said. “We’d better drop it.”

They had dropped it and he was too proud to tell Jeremy that he did know what he meant. For William was beginning to know that he lacked one grace among his gifts. He could not win love from ordinary people. He excused himself by saying that it was because they felt his superiorities, his obvious mental power, his ability to do easily what others did only by effort. The superior man, he told himself, turning the pages of his Nietzsche, must always be hated by his inferiors, but even this hatred could be turned to advantage and used as a tool for further power for good.

“I must expect hatred,” William thought. “I must accept it as my due because I am not understood. What the common man cannot understand he hates.”

Sometimes he thought even Jeremy hated him. But such moments passed and he was careful to seem kinder to his friend, more quick to help him, more patient with his frailties, his headaches, his manners.

William, relentlessly remembering his defeat, was further disturbed by an editorial in the Crimson before the class elections. Roosevelt wrote:

“There is a higher duty than to vote for one’s personal friends, and that is to secure for the whole class leaders who really deserve the positions.”

These were the words of a man determined to be a liberal in spite of class and property. While the Gold Coast repudiated them, votes belonged to the many.

William never forgave Franklin Roosevelt. He had already begun to believe that the people anywhere in the world were clods and fools and now he was convinced of their folly. The Boers who fought England were clods and fools. The Chinese he remembered upon the streets of Peking were clods and fools. From now on he spoke to no one at Harvard except those who lived on the Gold Coast.

Yet he heard one day a remark that horrified him again. A pallid professor with long mustaches said these words with an emphasis too fervent for William’s taste: “The American people control their own destiny.”

William began then in earnest the study of the history and government of his own country. He perceived to his dismay that the professor’s remark was a true one. Clods and fools though they might be, the American people elected their rulers, laughed at them, despised or admired them, obeyed or disobeyed them, clung to them or rejected them. He began after that to look at the people he passed on the street with consternation and even fear. Out of ignorance apparent upon their faces, obvious in their crude speech, these men chose from among themselves certain ones upon whom they bestowed the powers of state. It was monstrous. For months William felt himself in a den of lions. He tried to talk to Jeremy, who first laughed at him and then tried to explain:

“Americans aren’t just people — they are Americans.”

William had no such reverence. What he saw beyond the Gold Coast reminded him ominously of the streets and roads of China. He had feared the common people there. Had they not risen up in all their folly against men like his father? Von Ketteler had been murdered by an ignorant clod. He remembered that dignified German, who at the Fourth of July celebrations at the American Embassy had more than once spoken to him with courtesy. The common people could rise against their betters anywhere and kill them, unless they were taught and controlled.

Yet, how to control these boisterous, independent, noisy jokesters who were the common folk of his own country? They would not tolerate a real ruler. They had no respect for those above them. They delighted to pull down the great and destroy them. Look at Admiral Dewey, a hero for an hour, whose plaster triumphal arch, designed for marble, fell to dust and was carted away by the garbage collectors! The whim of the people was the most frightening force in the world.

Upon this William pondered, knowing now his own lack of charm, that strange senseless power to attract his fellows, the charm which young Franklin Roosevelt possessed as easily as he possessed height, fearlessness, and ready laughter. Without this frail gift, William told himself proudly, he must rely upon his brains and devise a means of teaching and controlling the wild beast of the multitudes. He would lead them wisely, insidiously, charming them through words, himself never seen.

In that third year in college he wrote to his father to say that he would not come back to China. “I feel I am needed more here than there. The truth is, I am not impressed by American civilization. I intend to start some sort of newspaper, something ordinary people will read, or at least look at, and so do what I can to enlighten my fellow countrymen.”

Some day, William vowed to his own heart, he would be the editor and owner of a newspaper, perhaps even a chain of newspapers, by which he could defeat any man he disliked or disapproved. To dislike was to disapprove. Money, of course, he must have but he would get it somehow. Quite stupid men were able to get rich.

Meanwhile, Franklin Roosevelt did not win the Phi Beta Kappa key, and William felt assuaged when he himself was among the chosen.

Yet the college years, as they passed, were good ones. He became a member of the Cameron family and spent his vacations with them, after brief duty visits to his grandparents and his sisters. It was accepted now that William was independent and different. Henrietta was proudly silent with him, Ruth worshiped him timidly, and his grandparents tried, somewhat in vain, to treat him as an ordinary young man. They knew he was extraordinary. Even Mrs. Cameron saw that now. It was pleasant to have about her a handsome young man who knew how to dress and was always ready to do what she needed done. He paid little attention to Candace, she reflected after each vacation, and he behaved like a strong elder brother to her poor son. She introduced William to the ladies at her Christmas At Home and forgot to mention that his father was a missionary, leaving the impression that he was connected with the diplomatic corps in Peking. William did not correct her.

His dreams hovered about the many happy weeks he spent in the great square house on Fifth Avenue. Each summer he accepted a job that Mr. Cameron offered him. He went to Europe with Jeremy, a combination secretary and guide, and they shared a valet. Together the two young men wandered about old cities and sailed the Mediterranean. It was a matter of course that William would always go home with Jeremy when the journey was over. He had his own two rooms in the vast Cameron house. They opened into Jeremy’s suite. From there he seldom wrote to or heard from his sisters and his grandparents, and Peking he had nearly forgotten. The Camerons had become his family.

He thought about the Camerons a great deal, pondering again the question of how, through them, he might reach vague heights he imagined but could not see. Among the many things he discussed with Jeremy this was not one. William was not crude. He had lived too long among Chinese, even though only servants. He felt crudity in his mother and shrank from it, but he forgave her because of her willingness to sacrifice. His mother was “for” him, as he put it, and when he discovered this quality in any person, he overlooked all else. Nevertheless he was glad that during his college years his mother was remote in Peking. He was still not yet sure that the Camerons were entirely “for” him, not even Jeremy. This uncertainty made him pleasantly diffident and unselfish in his dealings with each of them. To Jeremy, he gradually became someone always willing to spare him tiresome stairways when he wanted a book from the library, and so he wore away dislike. To William’s listening silence Jeremy in vacations talked more freely than at college, uncovering a delicate and poetic mind, racked with questions, and a spirit confounded by conscience. Thus Jeremy spoke on the solid matter of money.

“I know that if my father had not been rich I would now have been dead. But I wish I could owe my life to something else.”

“Perhaps you might say that you owe it to your father’s being so able as to get rich,” William had suggested.

“I don’t know that merely being able to get rich is anything particularly noble,” Jeremy had replied.

“Not everyone can do it, nevertheless,” William said. “Your father must have had some natural gift.”

A look of aversion came upon Jeremy’s pale and too mobile face. “The gift is only that of being able to overcome someone less strong in the competitive game.”

To this William put up silence, and into the silence Jeremy continued to talk. “Sons of rich men always complain of their father’s riches, I suppose. Yet there ought to be some way of living without stamping all the ants to death.”

Still William made no answer. Jeremy had come to no grips with life. The trouble with Jeremy was that he wanted nothing. He himself wanted everything; success with the newspaper he meant to have, and after that a wife beautiful and wealthy, a mansion to live in, a place in the world where he could be unique in some fashion he did not yet know, and the means to all this, he perceived, was money. He was perfectly sure that money was what he wanted first of all.

In his quiet way he reflected further upon the Cameron family. His brotherly relation to Jeremy he could easily develop. Quite honestly, he liked Jeremy. Candace he would consider as time passed. He was too nearly an intellectual to be in haste for marriage. Mrs. Cameron he understood and did not fear. His thoughts, flying like tentative gray hawks, now lit warily near the image of Mr. Cameron. This man was the central figure, the most important man, the one whom he must approach with real finesse. Mr. Cameron knew secrets. Pondering upon that vague and unimpressive person, William perceived that behind the nondescript face, the long and narrow mouth, there was something immense, a power strong and profoundly restrained. He guessed by some intuition of like mind that Mr. Cameron never told his true thoughts to his family, certainly at least not to women, and probably not to his delicate and oversensitive son. Into that loneliness William determined to go, not with deceit but with honesty.

“Mr. Cameron,” he said on Easter Sunday, “I would like to ask your advice about something.”

“Why not?” Mr. Cameron replied. Sunday was a day on which he drowsed. It was now afternoon, however, and late enough for him to have recovered from the immensities of dinner. He had slept, had waked, had walked in the garden with his wife and daughter to see the promise of some thousands of daffodils, and had come in again to reread the newspaper in the small sitting room off the drawing room, which was his favorite resting place. There William had come, after waiting patiently in his own room, from which he could see the prowling among the daffodils. Jeremy and Candace had gone with their mother to see their grandparents.

He sat down at a respectable distance from Mr. Cameron and upon a straight-back chair. His childhood in Peking had taught him deference to elders, and he would not have been comfortable had he chosen one of the deep chairs upholstered in brown leather.

“I would like to talk about my future, sir,” he said.

“What about it?” Mr. Cameron asked. His eyes roved to the newspaper at his feet. The financial section was uppermost and he was disgusted to see that the profits of a rival company had risen slightly above those of his own.

“I want to get rich,” William said simply.

Mr. Cameron’s gray eyebrows, bunched above his eyes, quivered like antennae. “What do you want to get rich for?” he demanded. He stared at William with something more than his usual careless interest.

“I see that here in America a man cannot get any of the things he wants unless he is rich,” William replied.

Mr. Cameron smiled and agreed suddenly. “You’re damn right!” He kicked the newspaper from his feet, sat back, and felt in his pocket for a cigar. It was a short thick one, and he lit it and puffed out a cloud of blue and fragrant smoke. The vague barrier that stood always between himself and his son’s friends fell away. He felt he could talk to William. He had always wished that he could talk to young men and tell them the things he knew. If an older man had talked to him when he was young he would have got along faster.

“I’ll tell you.” He shifted his cigar to the corner of his mouth. “If you want to get rich, William, you’ll have to quit thinking about anything else. You’ll have to concentrate. You have to put your mind to it.”

“Yes, sir.” William sat at attention, his hands folded upon his crossed knees. They were small hands, as Mr. Cameron remembered his wife had said they were, and they were already covered with surprisingly heavy black hair. William’s hair on his head was black, too, in contrast to his light gray-green eyes. An odd-looking boy, Mr. Cameron reflected, though so handsome.

“Have you thought of any special line?” Mr. Cameron asked.

William hesitated. “Did you, sir, at my age?”

“Yes, I did,” Mr. Cameron replied. “That’s the trick of it. You have to think of something that people want — not a few rich people, mind you, but all the ones who don’t have much money. You have to think of something that they must buy and yet that won’t cost too much. That’s how I thought of the Stores. I was clerk in a general store.”

William knew the Cameron Stores very well. There was one in almost every city. He had wandered about them more than once, looking at the piles of cheap underwear and kitchen utensils and groceries and dishes and baby carriages and linoleum, everything that an ordinary family might want and nothing that Mrs. Cameron would have had in her own house. It was repellent stuff.

“I’ve thought of a newspaper,” William said.

Mr. Cameron looked blank. “What about a newspaper?”

“A cheap newspaper,” William said distinctly. “With lots of pictures so that people will first look and then read.”

“I never thought of such a thing,” Mr. Cameron said. He stared at William, digesting the new and remarkable idea. “There are already plenty of newspapers.”

“Not the kind I mean,” William said.

“What kind do you mean?” Mr. Cameron asked. “I thought I knew about every kind there was.”

“I suppose you do, sir,” William said. “What I am thinking of, though, is new for America. I got the idea from England — and a little bit, perhaps, from the New York World, and then the Journal. But I didn’t think of doing anything myself until I began to hear about Alfred Harmsworth in England. Have you seen his papers, sir?”

“No,” Mr. Cameron said. “When I’m in London I always read the Times—maybe look at the Illustrated Times on the side.”

“My paper,” William said, as if it already existed, “is what’s called tabloid size and it is to have everything in it that can interest the masses. It won’t be for people like you, Mr. Cameron. It will have plenty of pictures. I’ve noticed even in college that most of the men don’t really read much but they will always look at pictures.”

“I hope you don’t mean yellow journalism,” Mr. Cameron said severely.

“No, I don’t,” William said. “I hope I can do something more subtle than that.” He paused and then went on thoughtfully, his eyes on the patterned carpet. “I thought, if you approved, I would talk with Jeremy about it and some day we might go in on it together.”

Mr. Cameron was pleased. It might be the very thing for Jeremy, easy work, sitting behind a desk. He had often wondered what to do with his fragile son, but he was too prudent to show approval. “Well, it would depend on what Jeremy wants. Newspapers cost a lot of money to start.”

William was calm. “That’s why I want to get rich.” He was too wise to repeat what his mother had often told him, even before he went to Chefoo. His mother had sown in him early the seeds of common sense. “You can’t have but so many friends,” she had said. “And each friend ought to count for something.” He had seen the folly of useless friends in the English school; his speaking acquaintance there with the British Ambassador’s son had served him more usefully than the horde of missionaries’ children.

At college he had selected from among Jeremy’s friends three whom he was transferring to himself, Blayne Parker, Seth James, and Martin Rosvaine. Blayne William still doubted because he was a poet, and Jeremy supplied to him something that William knew was not in himself. Seth and Martin he was resolved to keep. Yet there was no reason why the five of them, Jeremy included, should not stay together after college. Seth’s father alone could, if he would, supply the capital they would need. Meanwhile he was getting into their clubs.

“Got it all figured out, eh?” Mr. Cameron said. A look of admiration came over his face, mingled with reluctance. If Jeremy had been this sort of a fellow, he would have got him into the Stores. Invitation was on the tip of his tongue. “How would you like—” He swallowed the words. William would be too smart, maybe, ten years from now when he himself was getting to be an old man. He might not be able to cope with that new young smartness in case it opposed him. It was all right to give young men a chance, but not the whole chance. On the other hand, William might be the making of the Stores, at the time when he needed somebody. If the boy married Candy, for example, it would be almost as good as though he were born into the family. This would take time to think out. He leaned back and crossed his hands on the small paunch that hung incongruously on his lean frame. “When the time comes,” he said dreamily, “I might be able to do something myself, William. Only might, that is. I can’t tell from year to year, government being what it is in this country.”

William rose. “I wouldn’t think of such a thing, Mr. Cameron,” he said in a firm and resonant voice. “I’m sure I can stand on my own feet.” It was entirely the proper answer, although he felt that the time would come when he would need Mr. Cameron. Far better to owe money to Mr. Cameron than to the father of Seth James.

Before Mr. Cameron could reply, the door opened and Candace came in looking, her father thought fondly, like the morning star. She was all in rose and silver and wrapped in soft spring furs of white fox. Her cheeks were pink with the wind, for she had insisted on having the carriage windows open, and her yellow hair was curled about her ears and feathered over her forehead.

“Why have you two hidden yourselves away here?” she demanded. “Mother says please come out at once and be public. We have callers.”

“We’ve been talking business,” Mr. Cameron said. It was his instinctive reply to any demands from women.

“Nonsense,” Candace said. “William hasn’t any business.”

“He has an interesting idea,” Mr. Cameron said, fitting the tips of his fingers together. “A very interesting idea.”

Then he got an idea himself. He rose and made haste with his slow step toward the door. “I’ll go, just to please your mother. William doesn’t have to be bothered with our friends unless he wants to. I’ll bet it’s the Cordies, anyway.”

“It is,” Candace said, with dimples.

“Don’t you come, William,” Mr. Cameron said. “They won’t remember you next time they see you, anyway.”

Thus he left these two young members of his society together, and went his way inwardly pleased. Candace could be trusted. She wouldn’t let even her own husband do the family any damage. He was long used to eating his cake and having it too. The secret of such maneuvering had laid the foundation of his fortune — that and the resolute ignoring of the misfortunes of others. Maybe when the time came he would help William. He had a lot of loose cash he didn’t know what to do with.

Left alone with Candace, William said nothing and she sat down in the chair where her father had been sitting, threw off her fur jacket, and lifted her small flowered hat from her head.

“What have you two been talking about?” she asked.

“Your father asked me what I wanted to do after I finished college and I said start a newspaper,” William replied.

Her very clear blue eyes were sweetly upon him. “And why a newspaper?”

William shrugged his handsome shoulders. “Why does one do anything except because it is what one wants to do?”

“No, William, don’t run around the corner. Why do you feel so inferior to everybody?”

She had thrust a point into his heart. His blood rushed into his face and he was careful not to look at her.

“Do I feel inferior?” His usually careful voice was dangerously careless.

“Don’t you?” she demanded.

“I really don’t know myself.”

She refused the responsibility of special knowledge. “Anybody can see that you never come straight out with answers. You always think what to say.”

“I suppose that is because I have never lived much in America,” he replied. Though he despised his China, he often found it convenient to take refuge there. It gave him a reason, faintly romantic, for his difference from ordinary people.

“You mean the Chinese don’t answer honestly?” she asked.

“I think they prefer to answer correctly,” he said.

“But honesty is always right.”

“Is it?” he asked with wisdom gentle and superior.

“Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” he said again.

“But you must think,” she cried with soft impatience.

“I don’t always know what to think,” he replied. “I guess my way a good deal of the time. I meet people every day whom I cannot understand. I have no experience that would help me.”

She considered this for a brief instant. “Are the Chinese so different from us or are you only pretending?”

“Pretending what?”

“That you are different.”

“I hope I am not too different from you, Candy.”

This was a bold step and she retreated.

“I don’t know if you are or not. I can’t make you out, William.”

He felt he had gone far enough. “Nor I you, sometimes, except today you look lovely. We don’t have to make each other out as you call it — not yet, anyway. Let’s not hurry, eh, Candy? I want you to know me, as I really think I don’t know myself. That means time, plenty of time.” He said all this with his cultivated English accent which he had not yet rejected.

She fended him off.

“Why do you keep talking about time?”

He laughed silently. “Because I don’t want someone else to come dashing up on a steed of some sort and carry you off!”

This was very plain indeed, and she dropped her eyes to the pink rose she had fastened upon her white fur muff, and considered. When she spoke it was with mild malice upon her tongue.

“Yet I am sure that you always reach out to take what you want — as soon as you are sure you want it.”

William met this with astuteness. “Ah, but you see, this time you might not want what I want. And I confess to being Chinese again to this extent: I don’t like to be refused, even indirectly. I prefer not to be put in that position.”

“That’s your sense of inferiority again.”

“Call it just being sensible.”

“A bad sport, then.”

“What we are talking about is not sport.”

He spoke with such quiet authority that her youth was compelled to respect his. He was only a year older than she, and yet he might have been ten years her senior.

“I don’t know what we are talking about,” she said willfully.

“You and me,” he said gravely, “though two, or three years, perhaps, from now.”

“I shan’t want to marry anybody for a long time yet,” she said.

“That is all I wanted to know,” he replied. He had been leaning against the marble mantelpiece, his hands in his pockets. Now he went over to her and lifted her hand and put it to his lips. She would have pulled it away but he did not give her time. In the same instant he put her hand down and left the room. His lips had been cold and dry but his palm was damp. She took her handkerchief and rubbed her hand; then she thrust it deep into her muff and sat for a long time alone and thoughtful.

As the last months of college passed, William was oppressed by fear lest his parents decide to return for his commencement, a fear that he had never acknowledged even to himself until his father had written in April from Peking:

Neither your mother nor I can be there to see you take your honors, my dear son. This is a real grief to us. We have discussed the matter many times, and at first I was inclined, with her, to use our small savings and ask for leave of absence without salary. Then it seemed to me that I had no right to put personal feelings ahead of God’s work. This is a peculiar age in which we now live in China. The opportunity to preach the gospel is unprecedented. Much as I deplore the manner in which we finally brought the Old Empress to her knees, and especially the looting of the city by Western troops, nevertheless it has taught her a lesson. We are given every opportunity now. God works in mysterious ways and we must not lose the harvest. I only wish the old Dowager Empress could understand that she is defeated. Alas, she cannot imagine it.

Two weeks later his mother had sent pleasantly heartbroken pages:

My darling William, I cannot see you in all the pride of graduation from Harvard! The girls are costing us so much this year. Henrietta’s operation for appendicitis has prevented it. The Board paid for it, of course, as they should do, but when I asked for a brief furlough to see my own only son graduate they refused me, saying that they had already been put to much expense. We cannot blame Henrietta, still it does seem strange it should have happened like this. We could use our savings — such a mite — but I will not do it, for it would give the Board future ideas. They owe us much for just living so far from our homes. Oh my son, do have many pictures taken of the event! I am sure that you have friends who will, for your mother’s sake, make the day visible to me. Do beg dear Jeremy, or Mr. Cameron. Tell them how my heart aches not to be with you and them.

William had written a suitably sad letter and then, his spirit freed from the possibility of the presence of his preposterous parents, he had set himself to finish his senior year with glory.

One evening in June he was dressing himself for a dance. It was a few days before commencement and Martin Rosvaine’s family in Boston was giving him the occasion. The Rosvaines were old Bostonians, proper except that their ancestry was French instead of English. Wealth mended this defect and Gallic gaiety lingered in their blood and made them enjoy pleasures more lavish than could be found usually among other Bostonians. William was as near complete happiness on this evening as his unfulfilled ambitions allowed. Candace was among the young women invited and she and her parents were staying at the Hotel Somerset until after commencement. He felt a warm anticipation when he thought of her soft and pretty face, and he wondered if he would tell her that his name stood among those few who would receive their diplomas summa cum laude. He decided that he would not, because Jeremy had barely passed, in spite of William’s unflagging help with higher mathematics and modern languages. Candace was quick to be scornful of boasting and he could not explain to her that the English schoolmasters had grounded him well and had taught him to dig into fundamentals. Jeremy, persuaded by tutors through a delicate childhood, had not known that mathematics must be seized as one seizes a thistle, that German cannot be learned unless it is grappled with and overcome by force, that French can elude mind and tongue with its smoothness and escape memory entirely. Because an English schoolmaster in a Chinese seaport had used a ruler freely upon William’s palms, had cracked him over the skull, had tweaked his ears, had poured out the bitterest and most dry sarcasm about upstart Americans who were properly only English colonists, William had learned early how to achieve even his small ambitions. Somewhere in dark and private action there had to be struggle and mastery.

Never having had the advantage of such knowledge, Jeremy had been content to escape failure. He was now lying in bed, dressed in lavender silk pajamas becoming to his fair hair and pale skin. He had declared himself exhausted by watching the baseball game in the afternoon. Idly he watched William shave clean his strong dark beard with an old-fashioned razor. June sunshine poured through the windows and William stood with his feet in a bright square. His mind was busy with plans that had nothing to do with college. After commencement was over he would take two weeks’ holiday with the Camerons, and then he would plunge into the matter of getting money for the newspaper. His first plans for getting money he had given up altogether. He could not beg money from his college mates and their relatives. He would find it himself, get it, if possible, from Roger Cameron, borrow it perhaps, with Roger’s backing. Then he could hire Martin Rosvaine and Seth James. But he would do most of the work himself.

“You’re thinking about the paper,” Jeremy said suddenly.

“So I am,” William replied. He was putting on his tie, his small fingers, expert and supple. “How did you know?”

“I know that godalmighty look on your face,” Jeremy replied lazily. “I fear and respect it.”

“I’m no son of a millionaire,” William said with a mirthless smile. “I have to get out and hustle, the way your old man did. Maybe my son will be able to lie around and write poetry.”

“I can’t imagine your son doing such a thing,” Jeremy retorted.

He fell silent at this mention of William’s son, for inevitably a son must have a mother, and he knew by now that William wanted to marry Candace. He was in the puzzling place of being the confidant of both his sister and his friend and of being unable to betray to either what the other told him. Each was equally unsure. William had said frankly, only a few days ago, “I don’t know if I am doing wisely in letting myself fall in love with Candy. I like her being your sister, I like the notion of being your brother-in-law, you son-of-a-gun! But she’s used to everything and I shall have a hard row to hoe. I shan’t want her running home to papa, either. When I marry I’ll be the boss. If I have to eat cornpone, she’ll have to eat it and like it.”

William had looked particularly handsome at the moment when he had so spoken. They had come back to their rooms from a stag dinner at their club, and he was wearing new evening clothes presented somehow by his mother. He had gone down to New York to have them fitted.

Jeremy had laughed. “I’ll guarantee you won’t eat cornpone twice yourself,” he had replied. William’s taste in food was fastidious and expensive, shaped, Jeremy always said, by his early years of feeding upon shark’s fins and bird’s-nest soup in Peking.

When Candace had last mused upon marriage in his presence he had warned her that William was hardhearted.

“He has to be the master,” he had told Candace.

“Has he been that with you?” she demanded.

“No, because he has not got all he wants from me yet.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants power more than anything,” Jeremy said thoughtfully.

“That’s because he feels inferior,” Candace said at once. “He is afraid, in his heart. That’s so pitiful, Jeremy. He doesn’t know that he needn’t be afraid of anything or anybody, because actually he’s wonderful. He doesn’t know how wonderful he is.”

Jeremy grinned in brotherly fashion. “Doubtless he’d like to have you tell him so. But I warn you, Candy! You’ll have to give up to him, once he’s got you.” Then, after an instant’s silence, “It makes my flesh crawl.”

This startled her. “Why?” she demanded.

He shook his head. “There’s no love in him anywhere, for anybody.”

“Maybe he’s had nobody to love,” she said simply.

Fragments of such conversations came back to him as he lay watching William dress.

“You’re going to be late,” William said, throwing him a sharp look. His light eyes under the dark and heavy brows had a strange metallic quality.

“My family is used to me. They’ll wait. Maybe we’ll do the waiting. I wish my father had bought an Apperson instead of a Maxwell.”

“The Maxwell is bigger,” William said.

Mr. Cameron had surprised them all by buying an automobile after Easter, and had chosen the Maxwell for touring. It ran by steam, an idea already old-fashioned, but Mr. Cameron was afraid of the new-fangled gasoline cars.

A gooselike honking rose through the open window, followed by a hissing of steam. Jeremy leaped out of bed, put his head out of the window and shouted to the chauffeur, “Cool her off, Jackson!” He disappeared into the bathroom, snatching towels as he went, soft silky towels embroidered in Ireland with a large and intricate initial.

Left alone, William thought of Candace while he finished his toilet. His fingernails perfected, his coat adjusted, his tie correct, his hair smooth, he examined himself in the mirror. The dark oval of his face did not displease him, although he did not like the faint resemblance he saw there to Henrietta.

He looked at his watch. It was later than he had thought and he wondered if the florist had delivered the pink rosebuds and blue forget-me-nots he had ordered for Candace. His thoughts played pleasantly about her for a moment. He had made up his mind to marry her, and thinking of it he felt a hitherto vague excitement suddenly focus itself. Why should he not ask her tonight? A warm, fine night, the romantic setting of an opulent house, his own sense of success to be crowned soon with summa cum laude—what else did he lack? He was not impulsive, emotion had waxed slowly to this moment, and he would complete this first era of his history by settling the matter of his marriage.

He was so silent and even solemn that Jeremy watched him thoughtfully while dressing. In the car they were compelled to silence, muffled in caps and dusters, while Jackson speeded at more than ten miles an hour across the darkening countryside. There was a rising wind, and when in Boston the door of the huge house opened to them, sustained by a footman, both young men went at once to a dressing room to wash the gray dust from their faces.

William was separated from Jeremy immediately by Martin, come to find him.

“William — I say!” Martin cried in a low voice of excitement. “My old Aunt Rosamond is here and she’s interested in the newspaper!” He had pulled William into a corner under the vast oaken darkness of the stairs.

“I can’t ask people for money,” William muttered.

“Don’t be silly,” Martin said. He took William by the elbow and pushed toward the ballroom, where an old lady in black lace and diamonds sat in a high-backed chair against some palms.

“Auntie, this is William Lane,” Martin said.

William bowed.

“So you’re the young man,” Aunt Rosamond said in a loud voice. “Come from China, my grandson tells me. It’s an awful country, from all I hear, tying up women’s feet and killing missionaries!”

“I hope that is over, Miss Rosvaine,” William said gracefully.

“Don’t talk about China, Auntie,” Martin said impatiently. “Talk about our newspaper!” Over the plumed white head, Martin’s eye met William’s and winked.

“Why should she care about a picture paper for people who can scarcely read?” William asked.

“Aunt Rosamond is a shrewd woman,” Martin replied. “Aren’t you, Auntie? Why, she tells her own investment men what to buy and what to sell.”

Aunt Rosamond giggled. “I’m old enough to be their mother,” she said in her harsh, loud voice. “I’m old enough to be anybody’s mother. I could be your great-grandmother, only I’m glad I’m not. Young men are so ribald these days. Is your newspaper goin’ to make money?”

“Piles of it,” William said. “That’s why we’re starting it.”

“I hope its not for any nonsense of doin’ good to the masses,” Aunt Rosamond said still more loudly.

“Only good to ourselves.” William said. “I want to be a millionaire before I am thirty.” He knew now that the only way to interest the rich was to suggest more riches.

“You come and see me,” Aunt Rosamond commanded with quick interest. She turned large black eyes to his face, and he saw with surprise that once she must have been beautiful.

“Thank you,” William said. He turned to Martin. “There is Candace. Do excuse me, Miss Rosvaine.” He bowed and left them because he did not want to seem eager before a rich old woman, and he saw in Martin’s face the unwilling admiration which he loved.

Walking across the carpeted floor he stopped to shake hands with Mrs. Rosvaine, a gray-haired, handsome woman in a silver gown, and then with Mr. Rosvaine, who looked like the portrait of his French great-grandfather hanging over the mantelpiece. Then he went to the Camerons and, pretending that he saw Candace last, he shook hands with the two elders before he turned to her. She wore a long filmy white dress and carried the roses and forget-me-nots. She looked as a beautiful girl should look and as he wanted his wife to look, and the deep and secret jealousy of his nature rolled up out of his heart. It was intolerable that anyone except himself should possess this precious creature with all her gifts and graces. He might look the world over and not find a woman so suited to him, who was at the same time attainable.

“You look like a princess,” he told Candace.

“William, don’t tell me you’re poetic.” She gave him her careless and pretty smile.

“No, just that I’m partial to princesses,” he protested. “I grew up in the neighborhood of a palace, in Peking, you know, where princesses lived and played. They’re not strange to me.”

Mrs. Cameron overheard and said a little sharply. “Are your sisters coming to commencement, William?”

Taken aback he, too, spoke more sharply than he knew. “They’re coming tomorrow.”

“You’re a silent sort of an ape,” Jeremy put in. “Why didn’t you tell me they were coming?”

“I didn’t think you’d be interested,” William retorted.

“Of course I am,” Jeremy insisted. “You know my sister and am I not to know yours?”

“Henrietta is quite ugly,” William said with apparent frankness. “And though Ruth is pretty, I have never discovered anything interesting about her.”

“Men never see anything in their sisters,” Candace declared.

Their interest in any conversation not connected with themselves waned quickly. In the fashion of the rich, William thought.

“It is going to be hot,” Mrs. Cameron said in a plaintive voice.

“You can’t possibly be as hot in that outfit as I am in mine,” Mr. Cameron told her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have to wear a cor—”

“Mother, spare us!” Candace put in.

“I don’t mind William,” Mrs. Cameron said. “He’s used to us.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Cameron,” William said. “Come and sit down. I hope you’ve made Candace keep the first dance for me. She promised it but she never keeps her promises.”

“She’s a very naughty girl,” Mrs. Cameron said with vague indulgence, sitting down.

“I did keep it,” Candace said. “And I don’t break my promises.”

The orchestra began to play and the ballroom seemed suddenly full. William made a smile serve for answer and drew Candace into his arms. He danced beautifully and he was aware of watching eyes. He imagined them thinking of him with admiration, however reluctant. He liked to compel admiration.

Then he looked down and saw Candace’s face, calm and beautiful. Her skin was fine and smooth and creamy white, her lips sweet and deeply cut. How fortunate for him if she would marry him soon! Why should they be long engaged? He needed Candace now, for herself and for everything she could bring to him. He would ask her tonight. He could see Jeremy’s eyes watching him. It was a man’s own business whom he married and when he married. In such dreams, compounded of the many mixtures in himself, he went through the evening, evading Jeremy, dancing with Candace again and again, and when she was not free he asked no one else. Then to his horror he saw her dancing twice with Seth James. Pangs seized him. Seth was one of her kind, the son of a man richer even than her father.

He went to Candace to claim his own last dance. “I can’t let Seth look at you like that,” he said sternly, as he took her in his arms.

She smiled dreamily without answer and he saw her shoulders shining white and her hair gold in the light of the lamps. He imagined that she was withdrawn from him and instantly he wanted to force her attention to himself.

“I won’t tell you how beautiful you are,” he said half carelessly. “I suppose Seth has said all that.”

“Yes,” she murmured.

He imagined that she was holding herself away from him and he drew her closer. “You are not in rhythm.”

“They’re playing the waltz too slowly,” she replied, but she yielded herself, her cheek all but touching his shoulder. Still he was not satisfied.

He stopped and they stood motionless in the whirling crowd. “Come along outside,” he said abruptly. “I’ve been full of something all evening — something I’ve wanted to say.”

He put her hand in his arm and led her away, looking strangely grim for a young man in love. Jeremy, across the room, watched them go through an open door and since for the moment he was not dancing, he went to find his parents. They were waltzing quietly together in a distant corner and they stopped as he came up.

“I just want to warn you,” he said in a low voice. “At this very moment William is going to ask Candace to marry him.”

“Oh dear!” his mother exclaimed.

His father looked grave. “I don’t know that we can do a thing about it,” he said after an instant’s thought.

Before Jeremy’s astonished eyes the two looked at each other and resumed again the slow measures of their waltz. He left them after another moment and then went to pour himself a large glass of whisky and drink it down.

Outside the house, under a wisteria bower in the garden lit by Chinese lanterns, William began his proposal to Candace. He had wondered how this should be done, and had made some half-dozen plans, none of which he now used. She looked so cool, so full of sweet common sense, that he felt it wisdom to approach her in like mood.

“Candy, I think you have known for a long time that I want to marry you, if you will have me.”

These were the words he spoke almost as soon as she had sat down. She shook out her little Chinese fan. He had given her the fan last Christmas, a thing of silk and sandalwood which his mother had chosen for him in Peking. He smelled the sandalwood now in the warm air of the night, and childish memories stirred, sandalwood and incense and the close sweet smell of old temples in the hills where the American missionary families had sometimes picnicked in the long, bright northern summers. He turned away from such useless remembrance.

Candace had not replied.

“Well?” he asked a little too sharply.

“I didn’t think you would ask me quite yet,” she said.

He was not able to tell from the pure cool tones whether she was glad or sorry. “I didn’t know, either,” he replied in the manner with which he had chosen to present himself to her. “Perhaps I ought to wait until I have some sort of income. But the last few days I’ve asked myself why I should wait. I’d rather like to remember some day when I’ve built you a palace and filled it with slaves that I proposed to you when I was penniless and that you accepted me so.”

She laughed. “A nice idea!” She waved the fan and once more the scent came blowing against his face. He moved from it half impatiently.

“Then will you, Candy?”

“Will I what?”

“Oh, Candy, don’t tease!”

“But you haven’t said you love me!”

“Of course I love you.”

It was the first time he had ever spoken the words to any creature and they sat upon his tongue like pebbles.

“How strangely you say that!” she said shrewdly.

“Because it is strange to me. I’ve never said it before to anybody.”

This touched her, he could see. She looked at him curiously, her lashes lifted and long. He had the usual amount of passion in him, he supposed, though he had never tried himself. Jeremy was clean and delicate, and though Martin went about visiting strange places, the young men whom William had cultivated were not often physically gross. Lustfulness was not one of his own natural sins. Yet slowly he felt rise in him a strong desire to touch this beautiful girl and, guided by instinct, he put out his arms and felt her come into them. Beneath and against his cheek he felt her hair.

“Dearest!”

The word rose to his lips of its own accord. He had heard his father use it once or twice to his mother. They had not often been affectionate before others, and the word had clung in his mind.

“Will you be good to me, William?”

“Yes, I will. I swear it.”

He heard her sigh, he felt her lean against him and the fan dropped to the ground. It seemed to him suddenly that he loved her with all the love he ought to have.

Over the grass, in moonlight and lantern light mingled, a quickened waltz floated upon waves of music and Candace pulled herself away. “Let’s go back and dance!”

“But are we engaged, Candy?” he urged.

She stood up but he would not let her go, his arms about her waist. He wanted to be sure she was his before she went back into the rooms crowded with young men.

“I–I suppose so,” she said, half unwillingly, half shyly.

“We are!”

He stood up and seized her again and kissed her long and hard. When he released her she gave a little cry.

“Ah, you’ve broken my fan!”

He had indeed. When he picked up the fan it lay in his hand like a broken flower. He had crushed the filigree with his heel, and the scent was strong in his nostrils.

“Never mind, I’ll send to Peking for another, ivory instead of sandalwood, and set with kingfishers’ feathers instead of silk.”

“Ivory has no scent,” she complained. “Give me the pieces, William. I shan’t ever like a fan so well again.”

He gave them to her, half resentfully, and they walked into the house and began to dance together in silence. He was angry with himself and then with her. The moment that he had wanted to be perfect had ended badly. He had been awkward, perhaps, but she had been unforgiving. Nevertheless he had proposed and had been accepted. They went on dancing.

On commencement day William rose and breakfasted before Jeremy woke, and from the dining hall he went out and across the Yard to the big elm under which he had agreed to meet his sisters and grandparents. They had reached town early, had taken a hack to a small second-class hotel and there had breakfasted.

He saw them waiting for him now, and for a moment they were as detached, as isolated, as a photograph in a family album.

Henrietta was plainer than ever and his grandparents were more middle class than he had thought possible. Ruth had grown up pretty and gentle and he felt a sudden renewal of affection for her. He need not be ashamed of her. But no distaste showed on his resolute young face. He smiled and shook hands properly with his elders.

“How are you, Grandfather? Grandmother, it’s awfully good of you, really — I hope the trip wasn’t hard.” He kissed Henrietta’s cheek and squeezed Ruth’s slender shoulders in his arms. “Come along. We’ll get good seats.”

The Yard was coming to life. Seniors in cap and gown were hastening here and there.

He led his guests into the wide-open doors of the hall where a few people were already gathering, and he took pains to find seats where they could see him receive his honors.

“Ruth shall sit on the aisle, so she can see me when we come marching in,” he said, and caught her smile.

Henrietta had said nothing since they met. She wore a plain dark blue linen suit and a stiff sailor hat that emphasized the angles of her face. Her eyes were brown like their father’s, but they were deep-set and intense, while his were shallowly set and pleasant. This William saw but he did not notice her silence. He was in haste to be off on his own business, to leave them.

“Let’s meet again under the elm after this is over.”

He met their solemn, dazed eyes, tried to smile, and hurried away. His rooms were empty. Jeremy was gone. He snatched his cap and gown and put them on, glanced at himself in the mirror, and joined the thickening crowd. He felt them looking at him as he strode toward the Yard but he pretended he did not. Confidence, excitement, the assurance of success, were hid behind his set and handsome face. The honor the day would bring him was only the first step to all that lay ahead, and he knew it. He took his place among his classmates, and the important day began, the end and purpose of four long and sometimes tedious years.

Then suddenly he lost it as he was to lose so many days from his life. Everything became unreal to him. His mind seemed to leave his body. It raced ahead into the years, planning, fighting, conquering, gaining all that he wanted. When would he have enough? When would he know and what would be satisfaction? He tried to bring himself back to this hour, which now that he had it seemed no more an end but only a beginning. He even felt vaguely that he was losing it and he wanted to keep it. It was a part of satisfaction, the first step at least toward fulfillment, a fragment of his life completed. He tried to think of Candace as he sat among his fellows; he tried to value the sound of his name upon the list of honor men.

“William Lane, summa cum laude—”

But he had ceased already to value what he had, so immense was his desire for what was yet to come.

When the long morning was over he went at once to his grandparents and his sisters. They were waiting for him under the big elm, and his grandmother murmured affection as he come to them.

“Your mother will be so proud.” Her eyes misted with the easy tears of the old.

“My father got the same honors,” William said modestly. “It was harder in his day, I daresay. He took much more Greek than I did.”

Ruth held out a small package, and he took it with affected surprise. “A chain for your watch,” she murmured. “It’s nothing much.”

“I brought you a book,” Henrietta said, producing a package. “I wrapped it in red because it’s what they do in China.”

“And Grandma and I just have a little check,” his grandfather said, giving him an envelope.

“It is all too much,” William said gracefully.

Ruth cried out softly, “Let’s go and see if there are letters from Mother and Father! I know Mother was going to try to have a letter here on this very day.”

“We’ll go by my rooms on our way to the hotel,” William said.

When he looked in his box there was no letter from China. A few bills were there, still to be paid, and one letter addressed in a hand he did not recognize. It was a tight scrawl, crude and yet formed in some curious personal fashion. He saw on the envelope the address of a town in Ohio that he did not know, and above it was the name of Clem Miller.

“No letter,” he told his sisters. “None from them, I mean. Here’s a strange one.”

He tore open the envelope. Within it was a single sheet of lined paper, upon which was the same cramped, clear handwriting.

Dear William,

You may not remember me. Once you told me to stop fighting a Chinese fellow in Peking. I never saw you after that. I am here at a grocery store. Got a fair job. Wish, though, I had a chance at your education. Am fighting my way up though. I got your address from your father. Wrote to some friends of mine named Fong in Peking but had forgot a good deal of my Chinese and wrote English thinking maybe their son, Yusan, would be able to read print. He showed the letter to your father, and I got a letter that way telling me you were finishing college. I haven’t had the chance. Your father told me to get in touch, and I am doing so in memory of old days.

Yours sincerely,

Clem Miller.

“Who is it from?” Ruth asked, as they walked toward the street.

William was looking up and down for a hack. The sun was getting hot. “You remember that Faith Mission family in Peking?”

Ruth shook her head. “I can’t remember very much about Peking.”

“I remember them,” Henrietta said suddenly. “Let me read the letter.”

“You may keep it if you like,” William said carelessly. “There is no reason for me to answer it.”

He saw a hack, called it, and they climbed in, he taking the small and uncomfortable seat although Ruth offered to sit there. “You are my guests,” he said with his best smile.

The day went on, he living each hour of it grimly and correctly. He showed his family about the college and his grandmother suggested seeing his rooms. He put this off until Henrietta was suddenly cross. “I think you don’t want us to see them,” she declared.

Upon this, with secret anger, he led them to the rooms, dreading the possibility that the Camerons were there. But the rooms were empty, and his grandmother sat down in Jeremy’s easy chair and slipped her shoe from her heel. “I bought new shoes for the big day,” she said in apology. “You know what they do to your feet.”

He did not reply to this dreadful remark, and was restless until he got them up again. Yet not in time, for at the moment when they reached the door Jeremy came in and William could not refuse introductions. Jeremy, with his usual grace, stood talking to the elders and Ruth joined them. Henrietta waited in her stolid fashion.

It lasted but a moment, and he was leading them on again, now toward the gate and the hack. Then they were gone and he felt exhausted and yet he could not show exhaustion, for men he did not know stopped to congratulate him on his honors. He tried to accept their praise modestly, to seem careless as though honors meant nothing to him, but he imagined that they saw through his pretense, and then he grew brief and proud and he felt hurt and weary. He was hot and he wanted a bath and a few minutes’ sleep.

Half an hour later, stretched on his bed in his room alone, the shades drawn to shut out the sun, when he tried to think of Candace he found himself thinking instead of Aunt Rosamond. It might be very easy indeed to get money from an old lady like that, perhaps a great deal of money. Then after some deep thinking of this sort he felt that he would like honestly to be ashamed of it, but he could not be. He had nothing and no one to help him. There was not one person in his own family who could be anything but a hindrance to him, and the sooner he separated himself from them the better. He toyed with the memory of Aunt Rosamond’s invitation. It meant nothing He knew by now that the rich could speak pleasant words as easily as they breathed, with as little significance. It was hard to be the friend of rich men and their sons, but it was the only way to get what he needed for his own independence. Some day, when he had all he wanted, he would let them know how he despised them.