THE MASTER ROGUE

OTHER BOOKS BY
DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

The Great God Success, Her Serene Highness
A Woman Ventures
Golden Fleece

“The razor cut me and dropped to the floor.”

THE MASTER ROGUE

The Confessions of a Crœsus

By
David Graham Phillips

Illustrated by Gordon H. Grant

McClure, Phillips & Co.
New York
1903

Copyright, 1903, by
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO
Published September, 1903

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE MASTER ROGUE

I

I cannot remember the time when I was not absolutely certain that I would be a millionaire. And I had not been a week in the big wholesale dry-goods house in Worth Street in which I made my New York start, before I looked round and said to myself: “I shall be sole proprietor here some day.”

Probably clerks dream the same thing every day in every establishment on earth—but I didn’t dream; I knew. From earliest boyhood I had seen that the millionaire was the only citizen universally envied, honoured, and looked up to. I wanted to be in the first class, and I knew I had only to stick to my ambition and to think of nothing else and to let nothing stand in the way of it. There are so few men capable of forming a definite, serious purpose, and of persisting in it, that those who are find the road almost empty before they have gone far.

By the time I was thirty-three years old I had arrived at the place where the crowd is pretty well thinned out. I was what is called a successful man. I was general manager of the dry-goods house at ten thousand a year—a huge salary for those days. I had nearly sixty thousand dollars put by in gilt-edged securities. I had built a valuable reputation for knowing my business and keeping my word. I owned a twenty-five-foot brownstone house in a side street not far from Madison Avenue, and in it I had a comfortable, happy, old-fashioned home. At thirty-two I had gone back to my native town to marry a girl there, one of those women who have ambition beyond gadding all the time and spending every cent their husbands earn, and who know how to make home attractive to husband and children.

I couldn’t exaggerate the value of my family, especially my wife, to me in those early days. True, I should have gone just as far without them, but they made my life cheerful and comfortable; and, now that sentiment of that narrow kind is all in the past, it’s most agreeable occasionally to look back on those days and sentimentalise a little.

That I worked intelligently, as well as hard, is shown by the fact that I was made junior partner at thirty-eight. My partner—there were only two of us—was then an elderly man and the head of the old and prominent New York family of Judson—that is not the real name, of course. Ours was the typical old-fashioned firm, doing business on principles of politeness rather than of strict business. One of its iron-clad customs was that the senior partner should retire at sixty. Mr. Judson’s intention was to retire in about five years, I to become the head of the firm, though with the smaller interest, and one of his grandsons to become the larger partner, though with the lesser control—at least, for a term of years.

It was called evidence of great friendship and confidence that Mr. Judson thus “favoured” me. Probably this notion would have been stronger had it been known on what moderate terms and at what an easy price he let me have the fourth interest. No doubt Mr. Judson himself thought he was most generous. But I knew better. There was no sentimentality about my ideas of business, and my experience has been that there isn’t about any one’s when you cut through surface courtesy and cant and get down to the real facts. I knew I had earned every step of my promotion from a clerk; and, while Mr. Judson might have selected some one else as a partner, he wouldn’t have done so, because he needed me. I had seen to that in my sixteen years of service there.

Judson wasn’t a self-made man, as I was. He had inherited his share in the business, and a considerable fortune, besides. The reason he was so anxious to have me as a partner was that for six years I had carried all his business cares, even his private affairs. Yes, he needed me—though, no doubt, in a sense, he was my friend. Who wouldn’t have been my friend under the circumstances? But, having looked out for his own interest and comfort in selecting me, why should he have expected that I wouldn’t look out for mine? The only kind of loyalty a man who wishes to do something in the world should give or expect is the mutual loyalty of common interest.

I confess I never liked Judson. To be quite frank, from the first day I came into that house, I envied him. I used to think it was contempt; but, since my own position has changed, I know it was envy. I remember that the first time I saw him I noted his handsome, carefully dressed figure, so out of place among the sweat and shirt sleeves and the litter of goods and packing cases, and I asked one of my fellow-clerks: “Who’s that fop?” When he told me it was the son of the proprietor, and my prospective chief boss, I said to myself: “It won’t be hard to get you out of the way;” for I had brought from the country the prejudice that fine clothes and fine manners proclaim the noddle-pate.

I envied my friend—for, in a master-and-servant way, that was highly, though, of course, secretly distasteful to me, we became friends. I envied him his education, his inherited wealth, his manners, his aristocratic appearance, and, finally, his social position. It seemed to me that none of these things that he had and I hadn’t belonged of right to him, because he hadn’t earned them. It seemed to me that his having them was an outrageous injustice to me.

I think I must have hated him. Yes, I did hate him. How is it possible for a man who feels that he is born to rule not to hate those whom blind fate has put as obstacles in his way? To get what you want in this world you must be a good hater. The best haters make the best grabbers, and this is a world of grab, not of “By your leave,” or “If you’ll permit me, sir.” You can’t get what you want away from the man who’s got it unless you hate him. Gentle feelings paralyse the conquering arm.

So, at thirty-eight, it seemed to be settled that I was to be a respectable Worth Street merchant, in active life until I should be sixty, always under the shadow of the great Judson family, and thereafter a respectable retired merchant and substantial citizen with five hundred thousand dollars or thereabouts. But it never entered my head to submit to that sort of decree of destiny, dooming me to respectable obscurity. Nature intended me for larger things.

The key to my true destiny, as I had seen for several years, was the possession of a large sum of money—a million dollars. Without it, I must work on at my past intolerably slow pace. With it, I could leap at once into my kingdom. But, how get it? In the regular course of any business conducted on proper lines, such a sum, even to-day, rewards the successful man starting from nothing only when the vigour of youth is gone and the habits of conservatism and routine are fixed. I knew I must get my million not in driblets, not after years of toil, but at once, in a lump sum. I must get it even at some temporary sacrifice of principle, if necessary.

If I had not seen the opportunity to get it through Judson and Company, I should have retired from that house years before I got the partnership. But I did see it there, saw it coming even before I was general manager, saw it the first time I got a peep into the private affairs of Mr. Judson.

Judson and Company, like all old-established houses, was honeycombed with carelessness and wastefulness. To begin with, it treated its employees on a basis of mixed business and benevolence, and that is always bad unless the benevolence is merely an ingenious pretext for getting out of your people work that you don’t pay for. But Mr. Judson, having a good deal of the highfaluting grand seigneur about him, made the benevolence genuine. Then, the theory was that the Judsons were born merchants, and knew all there was to be known, and did not need to attend to business. Mr. Judson, being firmly convinced of his greatness, and being much engaged socially and in posing as a great merchant at luncheons and receptions to distinguished strangers and the like, put me in full control as soon as he made me general manager. He interfered in the business only occasionally, and then merely to show how large and generous he was—to raise salaries, to extend unwise credits, to bolster up decaying mills that had long sold goods to the house, to indorse for his friends. Friends! Who that can and will lend and indorse has not hosts of friends? What I have waited to see before selecting my friends is the friendship that survives the death of its hope of favours—and I’m still waiting.

As soon as I became partner I confirmed in detail the suspicion, or, rather, the instinctive knowledge, which had kept me from looking elsewhere for my opportunity.

I recall distinctly the day my crisis came. It had two principal events.

The first was my discovery that Mr. Judson had got the firm and himself so entangled that he was in my power. I confess my impulse was to take a course which a weaker or less courageous man would have taken—away from the course of the strong man with the higher ambition and the broader view of life and morals. And it was while I seemed to be wavering—I say “seemed to be” because I do not think a strong, far-sighted man of resolute purpose is ever “squeamish,” as they call it—while, I say, I was in the mood of uncertainty which often precedes energetic action, we, my wife and I, went to dinner at the Judsons.

That dinner was the second event of my crucial day. Judson’s family and mine did not move in the same social circle. When people asked my wife if she knew Mrs. Judson—which they often maliciously did—she always answered: “Oh, no—my husband keeps our home life and his business distinct; and, you know, New York is very large. The Judsons and we haven’t the same friends.” That was her way of hiding our rankling wound—for it rankled with me as much as with her; in those days we had everything in common, like the humble people that we were.

I can see now her expression of elation as she displayed the note of invitation from Mrs. Judson: “It would give us great pleasure if you and your husband would dine with us quite informally,” etc. Her face clouded as she repeated, “quite informally.” “They wouldn’t for worlds have any of their fashionable friends there to meet US.” Even then she was far away from the time when, to my saying, “You shall have your victoria and drive in the park and get your name in the papers like Mrs. Judson,” she laughed and answered—honestly, I know—“We mustn’t get to be like these New Yorkers. Our happiness lies right here with ourselves and our children. I’ll be satisfied if we bring them up to be honest, useful men and women.” That’s the way a woman should talk and feel. When they get the ideas that are fit only for men everything goes to pot.

But to return to the Judson dinner—my wife and I had never before been in so grand a house. It was, indeed, a grand house for those days, though it wouldn’t compare with my palace overlooking the park, and would hardly rank to-day as a second-rate New York house. We tried to seem at our ease, and I think my wife succeeded; but it seemed to me that Judson and his wife were seeing into my embarrassment and were enjoying it as evidence of their superiority. I may have wronged him. Possibly I was seeking more reasons to hate him in order the better to justify myself for what I was about to do. But that isn’t important.

My wife and I were as if in a dream or a daze. A whole, new world was opening to both of us—the world of fashion, luxury, and display. True, we had seen it from the outside before; and had had it constantly before our eyes; but now we were touching it, tasting it, smelling it—were almost grasping it. We were unhappy as we drove home in our ill-smelling public cab, and when we reentered our little world it seemed humble and narrow and mean—a ridiculous fool’s paradise.

We did not have our customary before-going-to-sleep talk that night, about my business, about our investments, about the household, about the children—we had two, the boys, then. We lay side by side, silent and depressed. I heard her sigh several times, but I did not ask her why—I understood. Finally I said to her: “Minnie, how’d you like to live like the Judsons? You know we can afford to spread out a good deal. Things have been coming our way for twelve years, and soon——”

She sighed again. “I don’t know whether I’m fitted for it,” she said; “I think all those grand things would frighten me. I’d make a fool of myself.”

It amuses me to recall how simple she was. Who would ever suspect her of having been so, as she presides over our great establishments in town and in the country as if she were born to it? “Nonsense!” I answered. “You’d soon get used to it. You’re young yet, and a thousand times better looking than fat old Mrs. Judson. You’ll learn in no time. You’ll go up with me.”

“I don’t think they’re as happy as we are,” she said. “I ought to be ashamed of myself to be so envious and ungrateful.” But she sighed again.

I think she soon went to sleep. I lay awake hour after hour, a confusion of thoughts in my mind—we worry a great deal over nice points in morals when we are young. Then, suddenly, as it seemed to me, the command of destiny came—“You can be sole master, in name as well as in fact. You are that business. He has no right there. Put him out! He is only a drag, and will soon ruin everything. It is best for him—and you must!”

I tossed and turned. I said to myself, “No! No!” But I knew what I would do. I was not the man to toil for years for an object and then let weakness cheat me out of it. I knew I would make short shrift of a flabby and dangerous and short-sighted generosity when the time came.

One morning, about six months later, Mr. Judson came to me as I was busy at my desk and laid down a note for five hundred thousand dollars, signed by himself. “It’ll be all right for me to indorse the firm’s name upon that, won’t it?” he said, in a careless tone, holding to a corner of the note, as if he were assuming that I would say “Yes,” and he could then take it away.

A thrill of delight ran through me at this stretch of the hand of my opportunity for which I had been planning for years, and for which I had been waiting in readiness for nearly three months. I looked steadily at the note. “I don’t know,” I said, slowly, raising my eyes to his. His eyes shifted and a hurt expression came into them, as if he, not I, were refusing. “I’m busy just now. Leave it, won’t you? I’ll look at it presently.”

“Oh, certainly,” he said, in a surprised, shy voice. I did not look up at him again, but I saw that his hand—a narrow, smooth hand, not at all like mine—was trembling as he drew it away.

We did not speak again until late in the afternoon. Then I had to go to him about some other matter, and, as I was turning away, he said, timidly: “Oh, about that note——”

“It can’t be indorsed by the firm,” I said, abruptly.

There was a long silence between us. I felt that he was inwardly resenting what he must be calling the insolence of the “upstart” he had “created.” I was hating him for the contemptuous thoughts that seemed to me to be burning through the silence from his brain to mine, was hating him for putting me in a false position even before myself with his plausible appearance of being a generous gentleman—I abhor the idea of “gentleman” in business; it upsets everything, at once.

When he did speak, he only said: “Why not?”

I went to my desk and brought a sheet of paper filled with figures. “I have made this up since you spoke to me this morning,” I said, laying it before him.

That was false—a trifling falsehood to prevent him from misunderstanding my conduct in making a long and quiet investigation. The truth is that that crucial paper was the work of a great many days, and not a few nights, of thought and labour—it was my cast for my million.

The paper seemed to show at a glance that the firm was practically ruined, and that Mr. Judson himself was insolvent. It was to a certain extent an over-statement, or, rather, a sort of anticipation of conditions that would come to pass within a year or two if Mr. Judson were permitted to hold to his course. While in a sense I took advantage of his ignorance of our business and his own, and also of his lack of familiarity with all commercial matters, yet, on the other hand, it was not sensible that I should tide him over and carry him, and it was vitally necessary that I should get my million. Had he been shrewder, I should have got it anyhow, only I should have been compelled to use methods that, perhaps, would have seemed less merciful.

I sat beside him as he read; and, while I pitied him, for I am human, after all, I felt more strongly a sense of triumph, that I, the poor, the obscure, by sheer force of intellect, had raised myself up to where I had my foot upon the neck of this proud man, ranking so high among New York’s distinguished merchants and citizens. I have had many a triumph since, and over men far superior to Judson; but I do not think that I have ever so keenly enjoyed any other victory as this, my first and most important.

Still, I pitied him as he read, with face growing older and older, and, with his pride shot through the vitals, quivering in its death agony. I said, gently, when he had finished and had buried his face in his hands: “Now, do you understand, Mr. Judson, why I won’t sign away my commercial honour and my children’s bread?”

He shrank and shivered, as if, instead of having spoken kindly to him, I had struck him. “Spare me!” he said, brokenly. “For God’s sake, spare me!” and, after a moment, he groaned and exclaimed: “and I—I—have ruined this house, established by my grandfather and held in honour for half a century!” A longer pause, then he lifted his haggard face—he looked seventy rather than fifty-five; his eyeballs were sunk in deep, blue-black sockets; his whole expression was an awful warning of the consequences of recklessness in business. I have never forgotten it. “I trust you,” he said; “what shall I do?”

He placed himself entirely in my hands; or, rather, he left his affairs where they had been, except when he was muddling them, for more than six years. I dealt generously by him, for I bought him out by the use of my excellent personal credit, and left him a small fortune in such shape that he could easily manage it. He was free of all business cares; I had taken upon my shoulders not only the responsibilities of that great business, but also a load of debt which would have staggered and frightened a man of less courageous judgment.

I did not see him when the last papers were signed—he was ill and they were sent to his house. Two or three weeks later I heard that he was convalescent and went to see him. Now that he was no longer in my way, and that the debt of gratitude was transferred from me to him, I had only the kindliest, friendliest feelings for him. Those few weeks had made a great change in me. I had grown, I had come into my own, I realised how high I was above the mass of my fellow-men, and I was insisting upon and was receiving the respect that was my due. My sensations, as I entered the Judson house, were vastly different from what they were when the pompous butler admitted me on the occasion of the one previous visit, and I could see that he felt strongly the alteration in my station. I felt generous pity as I went into the library and looked down at the broken old failure huddled in a big chair. What an unlovely thing is failure, especially grey-haired failure! I said to myself: “How fortunate for him that this helpless creature fell into my hands instead of into the hands of some rascal or some cruel and vindictive man!” I was about to speak, but something in his steady gaze restrained me.

“I have admitted you,” he said, in a surprisingly steady voice, when he had looked me through and through, “because I wish you to hear from me that I know the truth. My son-in-law returned from Europe last week, and, learning what changes had been made, went over all the papers.”

He looked as if he expected me to flinch. But I did not. Was not my conscience clear?

“I know how basely you have betrayed me,” he went on. “I thank you for not taking everything. I confess your generosity puzzles me. However, you have done nothing for which the law can touch you. What you have stolen is securely yours. I wish you joy of it.”

My temper is not of the sweetest—dealing with the trickeries and stupidities of little men soon exhausts the patience of a man who has much to do in the world, and knows how it should be done. But never before or since have I been so insanely angry. I burst into a torrent of abuse. He rang the bell; and, when the servant came, calm and clear above my raging rose his voice, saying, “Robert, show this person to the door.” For the moment my mind seemed paralysed. I left, probably looking as base and guilty as he with his wounded vanity and his sufferings from the loss of all he had thrown away imagined me to be.

I confess that that was a very bad quarter of an hour. But, to make a large success in this world, and in the brief span of a lifetime, one must submit to discomforts of that kind occasionally. There are compensating hours. I had one last week when I attended the dedication of the splendid two-million-dollar recitation hall I have given to —— University.

Not until I was several blocks from Judson’s did the sense of my wrongs sting me into rage again. I remember that I said: “Infamous ingratitude! I save this fine gentleman from bankruptcy, and my reward is that he calls me a thief—me, a millionaire!”

Millionaire! In that word there was a magic balm for all the wounds to my pride and my then supersensitive conscience—a justification of the past, a guarantee of the future.

With my million safely achieved, I looked about me as a conqueror looks upon the conquered. A thousand dollars saved is the first step toward a competence; a million dollars achieved is the first step toward a Crœsus; and, in matters of money, as in everything else, “it is the first step that counts,” as the French say. I was filled with the passion for more, more, more. I felt myself, in imagination, growing mightier and mightier, lifting myself higher and more dazzlingly above the dull mass of work-a-day people with their routines of petty concerns.

In the days of our modesty my wife used to plan that we would retire when we had twenty thousand a year—enough, she then thought, to provide for every want, reasonable or unreasonable, that we and the children could have. Now, she would have scorned the idea of retiring as contemptuously as I would. She was eager to do her part in the process of expansion and aggrandisement, was eager to see us socially established, to put our children in the position to make advantageous marriages. We would be outshone in New York by none!

To win a million is to taste blood. The million-mania—for, in a sense, I’ll admit it is a mania—is roused and put upon the scent, and it never sleeps again, nor is its appetite ever satisfied or even made less ravenous.

A few years, and I left dry-goods for finance, where the pursuit of my passion was more direct and more rapidly successful. Every day I fixed my thoughts upon another million; and, as all who know anything about the million-mania will tell you, the act of fixing the thought upon a million, when one has earned the right to acquire millions, makes that million yours, makes all who stand between you and it aggressors to be clawed down and torn to pieces. As I grew my rights were respected more and more deferentially. Men now bow before me. They understand that I can administer great wealth to the best advantage, that I belong to one of that small class of beings created to possess the earth and to command the improvident and idealess inhabitants thereof how and where and when to work.

My family?

I confess they have not risen to my level or to the opportunities I have made for them. Naturally, with great wealth, the old simple family relationship was broken up. That was to be expected—the duties of people in our position do not permit indulgence in the simple emotions and pastimes of the family life of the masses. But neither, on the other hand, was it necessary that my wife should become a cold and calculating social figure, full of vanity and superciliousness, instead of maintaining the proud dignity of her position as my wife. Nor was it necessary that my children should become selfish, heartless, pleasure-seekers, caring nothing for me except as a source of money.

I suppose I am in part responsible—my great enterprises have left me little time for the small details of life, such as the training of children. They were admirably educated, too. I provided the best governesses and masters, and saw to it that they learned all that a lady or a gentleman should know; and in respect of dress and manners I admit that they do very well, indeed. Possibly, the complete breaking up of the family, except as it is held together by my money, is due to the fact that we see so little of one another, each having his or her separate establishment. Possibly I am a little old-fashioned, a little too exacting, in my idea of wife and children. Certainly they are aristocratic enough.

My son James is the thorn in my side. And, whenever I have a moment’s rest from my affairs, I find myself thinking of him, worrying over him. The latest development in his character is certainly disquieting.

He was twenty-five years old yesterday. He was educated at our most aristocratic university here, and at one in Europe of the same kind. It was his mother’s dream that he should be “brought up as a gentleman”; and that fell in with my ideas, for I did not wish him to be a money-maker, but the head of the family I purposed to found upon my millions, which are already numerous enough to secure it for many generations. “There is no call for him to struggle and toil as I have,” I said to myself. “The sort of financial ability I possess is born in a man and can’t be taught or transmitted by birth. He would make a small showing, at best, as a business man. As a gentleman he will shine. He only needs just enough business training to enable him to supervise those who will take care of his fortune and that of the rich woman he will marry.” I was determined that he should marry in his own class—and, indeed, he is not a sentimentalist, and, therefore, is not likely to disregard my wishes in that matter.

When he was eighteen I caught him in a fashionable gambling-house one night when I thought he was at his college. I could not but admire the coolness with which he made the best of it: stood beside me as I sat playing faro, then went over to a roulette table and lost several hundred dollars on a few spins of the ball. But the next day I took him sharply to task—it was one thing for me to play, at my age and with my fortune, I explained, but not the same for him, at his age, and with nothing but an allowance.

He shrugged his shoulders indifferently. “Really, governor,” he said, “a man must do as the other fellows in his set do. Didn’t you see whom I was with? If you wish me to travel with those people I must go their gait.”

That was not unreasonable, so I dismissed him with a cautioning. At twenty he went abroad, and, a year after he had returned, his bills and drafts were still coming. I sent for him. “Why don’t you pay your debts, sir?” I demanded, angrily, for such conduct was directly contrary to my teaching and example.

He gave me his grandest look—he is a handsome, aristocratic-looking fellow, away ahead of what Judson must have been at his age. “But, my dear governor,” he said, “a gentleman pays his debts when he feels like it.”

“No, he don’t,” I answered, furiously, for my instinct of commercial promptness was roused. “A scoundrel pays his debts when he feels like it. A gentleman pays ’em when they’re due.”

His reply was a smile of approval, and “Excellent! The best epigram I’ve heard since I left Paris. You’re as great a genius at making phrases as you are at making money.”

I caught him speculating in Wall Street—“One must amuse one’s self,” he said, cheerfully. But I was not to be put off this time. I had had some reports on his life—many wild escapades, many fantastic extravagances. The terrible downfall of two young men of his set made me feel that the time for discipline was at hand. But, as I was very busy, I had only time to read him a brief lecture on speculation and to exact from him a promise that he would keep out of Wall Street. He gave the promise so reluctantly that I felt confident he meant to keep it.

A week ago yesterday morning he came into my bedroom, before I was up, and said to my valet, Pigott: “Just take yourself off, Piggy!” And, when we were alone, he began: “Mother said I was to come straight to you.”

“What is it?” I demanded, my anger rising—experience has taught me that the more offhand his manner, the more serious the offence I should have to repair.

“I broke my promise to you about speculating, sir,” he replied, much as if he were apologising for having jostled me in a crowd.

I sat up in bed, feeling as if I were afire. “And does a gentleman keep his promises only when he feels like it?” I asked.

“But that isn’t all,” he went on. “My pool’s gone smash—you were on the other side and I never suspected it. And I’ve got a million to pay, besides——”

He took out his cigarette case, and lighted a cigarette with great deliberation.

“Besides—what?” I said, wishing to know all before I began upon him.

“I wrote your name across the back of a bit of paper,” he answered, hiding his face in a big cloud of smoke.

I fell back in the bed, feeling as if I had been struck on the head with a heavy weight. “You scoundrel!” I gasped.

“Sour grapes,” he muttered, his cheeks aflame and his eyes blazing at me.

“‘Don’t get apoplectic,’ he said, calmly; ‘you know you stole your start.’”

“What do you mean?” I said, my mind in confusion.

“The fathers have eaten sour grapes,” he quoted, “and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

I half sprang from the bed at this insolence. “Don’t get apoplectic,” he said, calmly; “you know you stole your start.”

At this infamous calumny I leaped upon him and flung him bodily out of the room. It was several hours before I was calm enough to dismiss the incident sufficiently to take up my affairs.

This has come at a particularly unfortunate time for me, as I am in the midst of several delicate, vast, and intricate negotiations, involving many millions and demanding all my thought. He has gone down on Long Island in care of his mother. It will be at least ten days before I can take up his case and dispose of it. I am undecided whether to give him another trial under severe conditions or to cast him off and make his younger brother my principal heir and successor. I confess to a weakness for him—possibly because he is so audacious and fearless. His younger brother is entirely too smooth and diplomatic with me; if I should elevate him, he would fancy that he had deceived me with his transparent tricks.

However, we shall see.

II

About a month after I sent James to my place on Long Island to be in the custody of his mother, I was dining in my Fifth Avenue house with only Burridge, my secretary, and Jack Ridley, who calls himself my “court fool.”

Although my mind was crowded with large affairs involving great properties and millions of capital, hardly a day had passed without my thinking of James and of his infamous conduct toward me. But without neglecting the duties which my position as a financial leader impose upon me, it was impossible for me to take time to do my duty as a parent. The duty which particularly pressed and absolutely prevented me from attending to my son was that of overcoming difficulties I had encountered in consolidating the three railways which I control in the State. To achieve my purpose it was necessary that a somewhat radical change be made in a certain law. I sent my agent to Boss —— to arrange the matter. I learned that he refused to order the change unless I would pay him three hundred thousand dollars in cash and would give him the opportunity to buy to a like amount of the new stock at par. He pleaded that the change would cause a tremendous outcry if it were discovered, as it almost certainly would be, and that he must be in a position to provide a correspondingly large campaign fund to “carry the party” successfully through the next campaign. He said his past favours to me had brought him to the verge of political ruin. In a sentence, the miserable old blackmailer was trying to drive as hard a bargain with me as if I had not been making stiff contributions to what he calls his “campaign fund” for years with only trifling favours in return. I was willing to pay what the change was worth, but I would not be bled. I brought pressure to bear from the national organisation of his party, and he came round—apparently.

Just as my bill was slipping quietly through the State Senate, having passed the Lower House unobserved, the other boss raised a terrific hullabaloo. Boss —— denied to my people that he had “tipped off” what was doing in order to revenge himself and get his blood-money in another way; but I knew at once that the sanctimonious old thief had outwitted me.

It looked as if I would have to yield. Of course I should have done so in the last straits, for only a fool holds out for a principle when holding out means no gain and a senseless and costly loss. But the knowledge that a defeat would cost me dear in future transactions of this kind made me struggle desperately. I sent for my lawyer, Stratton—an able fellow, as lawyers go, but, like most of this stupid, lazy human race, always ready to say “impossible” because saying so saves labour. “Stratton,” I said, “there must be a way round—there always is. Can’t I get what I want by an amendment to some other law that can be slipped through by the lobby of some other corporation as if for its benefit only? Take a week. Paw over the books and rake that brain of yours! There’s a hundred and fifty thousand in it for you if you find me the way round.”

“But the law—” he began.

I lost my temper—I always do when one of my men begins his reply to an order I’ve given him with the word “But.” “Don’t ‘but’ me, damn you,” said I. “I’m getting sick and tired of your eternal opposition. Crawford”—Crawford was my lawyer until I put him into the Senate—“used always to tell me how I could do what I wanted to do. You’re always telling me that I can’t do what I want to do.”

“I’m sorry to displease you, sir, but——”

“‘But’ again!” I exclaimed, sarcastically.

“Then, however,” he went on, with a conciliatory smile, “I’m not a legislator; I’m a lawyer.”

“Precisely,” said I. “And the only use I have for a lawyer is to show me how to do as I please, in spite of these wretched demagogues and blackmailers that control the statute-books. If you are as intelligent as Crawford led me to believe and as my own observation of you suggests, you’ll profit by this little talk we’ve had. Look round you at the men who are making the big successes in your profession nowadays—look at your predecessor, Crawford. Imitate them and stop casting about for ways of interpreting the law against your employer’s interest.”

Two days later he came to me in triumph. He had found the “way round.” I had my law slipped through, signed by the Governor, and safely put on the statute-book, the two bosses as unsuspicious as were the newspapers and the public. Then I came out in a public disavowal of my original purpose, denounced it as a crime against the people, and deplored that my railroad corporation should be unjustly accused of promoting it. You must fight the devil with fire.

Those two bosses—and the sensational newspapers that had been attacking them and my corporations—were astounded, and haven’t recovered yet. It will be six months before they realise that I have accomplished my purpose; even then they won’t be sure that I planned it, but will half believe it was my “luck.”

In passing, I may note that Stratton tells me I ought to pay him two hundred and fifty thousand dollars instead of one hundred and fifty thousand—for pulling me out of the hole! He has wholly forgotten having said “can’t be done” and “impossible” to me so many times that I finally had to stop him by cursing him violently. With their own vanity and their women-folks’ flattery for ever conspiring to destroy their judgment, it’s a wonder to me that men are able to get on at all. Indeed, they wouldn’t if they didn’t have masters like me over them.

After I had got my little joke on the bosses and the impertinent public safely on the statute-book, there remained the problem of how to take advantage of it without stirring up the sensational newspapers and the politicians, always ready to pander to the spirit of demagogy. I had my rights safely embodied in the law; but in this lawless time that is not enough. Instead of being respectful to the great natural leaders and deferential to their larger vision and larger knowledge, the people regard us with suspicion and overlook our services in their envy of the trifling commissions we get—for, what is the wealth we reserve for ourselves in comparison with the benefits we confer upon the country?

At this dinner which I have mentioned, both Burridge and Ridley were silent, and so my thoughts had no distraction. As I know that it is bad for my digestion to use my brain as I eat, I tried to start a conversation.

“Have you seen Aurora to-day?” I asked Burridge. She is my eldest daughter, just turned eighteen.

“She and Walter”—he is my second son, within a month or so of twenty-two—“are dining out this evening; she at Carnarvon’s, he at Longview’s. I think they meet at Mrs. Hollister’s dance and come home together.”

This was agreeable news. The names told me that my wife was at last succeeding in her social campaign, thanks to the irresistible temptation to the narrow aristocrats of the inner circle in the prospective fortunes of my children. While this social campaign of ours has its vanity side—and I here admit that I am not insensible to certain higher kinds of vanity—it also has a substantial business side. The greatest disadvantage I have laboured under—and at times it was serious—has been a certain suspicion of me as a newcomer and an adventurer. Naturally this has not been lessened by the boldness and swiftness of my operations. When I and my family are admitted on terms of intimacy and perfect equality among the people of large and old-established fortune, I shall be absolutely trusted in the financial world and shall be secure in the position of leadership which my brains have won for me and which I now maintain only by steady fighting.

“And Helen?” I went on. Helen is my other daughter, not yet twelve.

“She’s dining in her own sitting-room with her companion,” replied Burridge.

“I haven’t seen her for a day or two,” I said.

“Two weeks to-morrow,” answered Burridge.

Jack Ridley laughed, and I frowned. It irritates me for Ridley to note it whenever I am caught in seeming neglect of my children. He pretends not to believe that it is my sense of duty that makes me deprive myself of the family happiness of ordinary men for the sake of my larger duties. But he must know at the bottom that all my self-sacrifice is for my children, for my family, ultimately. I have the thankless, misunderstood toil; they have the enjoyment.

“Two weeks!” I protested; “it can’t be!”

“She came to me for her allowance this morning,” he said, “and she asked after you. She said your valet had told her you were staying here and were well. She said she’d like to see you some time—if you ever got round to it.”

This little picture of my domestic life did not tend to cheer me. Naturally, I went on to think of Jim. Ridley interrupted my thoughts by saying: “Have you been down on Long Island yet?”

This was going too far even for a “court fool”—his name for himself, not mine. Ridley is my pensioner, confidant, listening machine, and talking machine. He is of an old New York family, an honest, intelligent fellow, with an extravagant stomach and back. My wife engaged him, originally, to help her in her social campaigns. I saw that I could use him to better advantage, and he has gradually grown into my confidence.

In my lesser days, one of the things that most irritated me against the very rich was their habit of buying human beings, body and soul, to do all kinds of unmanly work, and I especially abhorred the “parasites”—so I called them—who hung about rich men, entertaining them, submitting to their humours, and bearing degradations and humiliations in exchange for the privileges of eating at luxurious tables, living in the colder corners of palaces, driving in the carriages of their patrons, and being received nominally as their social equals. But now I understand these matters better. It isn’t given to many men to be independent. As for the “parasites,” how should I do without Jack Ridley?

I can’t have friends. Friends take one’s time—they must be treated with consideration, or they become dangerous enemies. Friends impose upon one’s friendship—they demand inconvenient or improper, or, at any rate, costly favours which it is difficult to refuse. I must have companionship, and fate compels that my companion shall be my dependant, one completely under my control—a Jack Ridley. I look after his expensive stomach and back; he amuses me and keeps me informed as to the trifling matters of art, literature, gossip, and so forth, which I have no time to look up, yet must know if I am to make any sort of appearance in company. Really, next to my gymnasium, I regard poor old Jack as my most useful belonging, so far as my health and spirits are concerned.

To his impertinent reminder of my neglected duty I made no reply beyond a heavy frown. The rest of the dinner was eaten in oppressive silence, I brooding over the absence of cheerfulness in my life. They say it is my fault, but I know it is simply their stupidity in being unable to understand how to deal with a superior personality. It is my fate to be misunderstood, publicly and privately. The public grudgingly praises, often even derides, my philanthropies; the members of my family laugh at my generosities and self-sacrifices for them.

As I was going to my apartment and to bed, Ridley waylaid me. “You’re offended with me, old man?” he asked, his eyes moist and his lips trembling under his grey moustache. He weeps easily: at a glass of especially fine wine; over a sentimental story in a paper or magazine; if a grouse is cooked just right; when I am cross with him. And I think all his emotions, whether of heart or of stomach, are genuine—and probably about as valuable as most emotions.

“Not at all, not at all, Jack,” I said, reassuringly; “but you ought to be careful when you see I’m low in my mind.”

“Do go down to see the boy,” he went on, earnestly. “He’s a good boy at heart, as good as he is handsome and clever. Give him a little of your precious time and he’ll be worth more to you than all your millions.”

“He’s a young scalawag,” said I, pretending to harden. “I’m almost convinced that it’s my duty to drive him out and cut him off altogether. After all I’ve done for him! After all the pains I’ve taken with him!”

Ridley looked at me timidly, but found courage to say: “He told me he’d never talked with you so much as sixty consecutive minutes in his whole life!”

This touched me at the moment. I’m soft at times, where my family is concerned. “I’ll see; I’ll see,” I said. “Perhaps I can go down to him Sunday. But don’t annoy me about it again, Jack!” There’s a limit to my good-nature, even with poor old well-meaning Ridley.

But other matters pressed in, and it was the following Monday and then the following Saturday before I knew it. Then came the first Sunday in the month, and Burridge, as usual, brought in the preceding month’s domestic accounts as soon as I had settled myself at breakfast after my run and swim and rubdown in my “gym” in the basement. As a rule, at that time I’m in my best possible humour. My wife and children know it and lie in wait then with any particularly impudent requests for favours or particularly outrageous confessions that must be made. But on the first Sunday in the month even my “gym” can’t put me in good-humour. I am a liberal man. My large gifts to education and charity and my generosity with my family prove it beyond a doubt. My wife looks scornful when I speak of this. Her theory is that my public gifts are an exhibition of my vanity, and that my establishments, my yacht, etc., etc., are partly vanity, and partly my selfish passion for my own comfort. She, however, never attributes a good motive or instinct to me, or to any one else, nowadays. Really, the change in her since our modest days is incredible. It is amazing how arrogant affluence makes women.

But, as I was saying, my monthly bill-day is too much for my good-humour. It is not the money going out that I mind so much, though I’m not ashamed to admit that it is not so agreeable to me to see money going out as it is to see money coming in. The real irritation is the waste—the wanton, wicked, dangerous waste.

I can’t attend to details. I can’t visit kitchens, do marketing, superintend housekeepers and butlers, oversee stables, and buy all the various supplies. I can’t shop for furniture and clothing, and look after the entertainments. All those things are my wife’s business and duty. And she has a secretary, and a housekeeper, and Burridge, and Ridley, to assist her. Yet the bills mount and mount; the waste grows and grows. Extravagance for herself, extravagance for her children, thousands thrown away with nothing whatever to show for it! The money runs away like water at a left-on faucet.

The result is the almost complete estrangement between my wife and me. Every month we have a fierce quarrel over the waste, often a quarrel that lasts the month through and breaks out afresh every time we meet. She denounces me as a miser, a vulgarian. She goads me into furious outbursts before the children. What with my battles against stupidity and insolence down-town, and my battles against waste in my family, my life is one long contention. However, I suppose this is the lot of all the great men who play large parts on the world’s stage. No wonder those who fancy we are on earth to seek and find happiness regard life as a ghastly fraud.

“What’s the demnition total, Burridge?” I asked, when he appeared with his arms full of books and papers.

“Ninety-two thousand, four, twenty-six, fifty-one,” he answered, in a tone of abject apology.

I could not restrain an indignant expostulation. “That’s seventy-three hundred and four above last month. Impossible! You’ve made a mistake in adding.”

He went over his figures nervously and flushed scarlet. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, in a tone of terror. “The total is ninety-five thousand instead of ninety-two.”

Ten thousand-odd above month before last! Eighty-nine hundred above the same month last year! I had to restrain myself from physical violence to Burridge. I ordered him out of the room—giving as my reason anger at his mistake in addition. I wanted to hear no more, as I felt sure the details of the shameful waste would put me in a rage which would impair my health. The total was enough for my purpose—we were now living at the rate of more than a million dollars a year! I took the eleven o’clock train for my place on Long Island.

When I reached my railway station none of my traps was there. In my angry preoccupation I had forgotten to telephone from the Fifth Avenue house; and, of course, neither Pigott nor the butler nor Burridge nor Ridley nor any of my herd of blockhead servants had had the consideration to repair my oversight. Yet there are fools who say money will buy everything. Sometimes I think it won’t buy anything but annoyances.

So I had to go to my place in a rickety, smelly station-surrey—and that did not soothe my rage. However, as I drove into and through my grounds—there isn’t a finer park on Long Island—I began to feel somewhat better. There is nothing like lands and houses to give one the sensation of wealth, of possession. I have often gone into my vaults and have looked at the big bundles and boxes of securities; and, by setting my imagination to work, I have got some sort of notion how vast my wealth and power are. But bits of paper supplemented by imagination are not equal to the tangible, seeable things—just as a hundred-dollar bill can’t give one the sensation in the fingers and in the eyes that a ten-dollar gold piece gives. That is why I like my big houses and my city lots and my parked acres in the country—yes, and my yacht and carriages and furniture, my servants and horses and dogs, my family’s jewels and finery.

But the instant I entered the house my spirits soured again, curdled into an acid fury.

I had sent my son down there with his mother to await my sentence upon him for his crimes—his insults to me, his waste of nearly a million of my money, his violation of his word of honour, his forgery. I had been assuming that in those five weeks of waiting he was suffering from remorse and suspense, was thinking of his crimes against me and of my anger and justice. As I entered the large drawing-room unannounced, they were about to go in to luncheon. “They” means my wife and James, and Walter and Aurora, who had gone down to the country for the week-end. “They” means also ten others, six of whom were guests staying in the house. As I stood dumfounded, five more who had been to church came trooping in. I had gone, expecting a house of mourning. I had found a revel.

At sight of me the laughter and conversation died. My wife coloured. James looked abashed for a moment. Then—what a well-mannered, self-possessed dog he is!—he burst out laughing. “Fairly trapped!” he said. And he went on to explain to the others: “The governor and I had a little fall-out, and he sent me down here to play with the ashes. You’ve caught me with the goods on me, governor. It’s up to me—I’ve got to square myself. So I’ll pay by giving you the two prettiest young girls in the room to sit on either side of you at luncheon. Let’s go in, for I’m half-starved.”

As all the women in the room except three—including Aurora—were married, James’s remark was doubly adroit. What could I do but put aside my wrath and set my guests at their ease?

This was the less difficult to do as Natalie Bradish and Horton Kirkby were among the guests—and stopping in the house. I have long had my eye on Miss Bradish as the proper wife for James or Walter—whichever should commend himself to me as my fit successor at the head of the family I purpose to found with the bulk of my wealth. She is a handsome girl; she has a proud, distinguished look and manner; she will inherit several millions some day that can’t be distant, as her father is in hopelessly bad health; she comes of a splendid, widely connected family, and is extremely ambitious and free from sentimental nonsense. Young Kirkby is the very husband for Aurora. His great-grandfather founded their family securely in city real estate and lived long enough firmly to establish the tradition of giving the bulk of the fortune to the eldest male heir. Kirkby is not brilliant; but Aurora has brains enough for two, and he has a set of long, curved fingers that never relax their hold upon what’s in them.

After luncheon I drew my wife away to the sitting-room for the plain talk which was the object of my visit. As the presence of Miss Bradish and Kirkby in the house had lessened my anger on the score of my wife and son’s light-hearted way of looking at his crimes, I put forward the matter of the expense accounts.

“Burridge tells me the total for last month is—” I began, and paused. As I was speaking I was glancing round the room. I had not been in it for several years. I had just noted the absence of a Corot I bought ten years before and paid sixteen thousand dollars for. I don’t care for pictures or that sort of thing, any more than I care for the glitter of diamonds or the colours of gold and silver in themselves. I know that most of this talk of “art” and the like is so much rubbish and affectation. But works of art, like the precious stones and metals, have come to be the conventionally accepted standards of luxury, the everywhere recognised insignia of the aristocracy of wealth. So I have them, and add to my collection steadily just as I add to my collection of finely bound books that no one ever opens. What slaves of convention and ostentation we are!

“What’s become of the Corot that used to hang there?” I asked, suspiciously, because I had had so many experiences of my family’s trifling with my possessions.

My wife smiled scornfully. “I believe you carry round in your head an inventory of everything we’ve got, even to the last pot in the kitchen,” she said. “The Corot is safe. It’s hanging in my bedroom.”

In her bedroom! A Corot I’ve been offered twenty-five thousand dollars for, and she had hidden it away in her bedroom! I was irritated when she put it in her sitting-room where few people came, for it should have had a good place in our New York palace. But in her bedroom, where no one but the servants would ever have a chance to look at it!

“Why didn’t you put it in the attic or the cellar?” I asked.

She lifted her eyebrows and gave me an affected, disdainful glance. “I put it in my bedroom because I like to look at it,” she said.

I laughed. What nonsense! As if any sensible person—and she is unquestionably shrewdly sensible—ever looks at those things except when some one is by, noting their “devotion to art.” I said: “Certainly my family has the most amazing disregard of money—of value. If it were not——”

“You started to say something about last month’s accounts,” she interrupted.

“The total was ninety-five thousand,” I said, looking sternly at her. “You are now living at the rate of more than a million a year. In ten years we have jumped from one hundred thousand a year to a million a year. And this madness grows month by month.”

She—shrugged her shoulders!

“I came to say to you, madam—” I went on, furiously.

“Did you look at the items?” she cut in coldly.

“No,” I replied; “I could not trust myself to do it.”

“Twenty-seven thousand of last month’s expenses went toward paying a small instalment on your little place for your own amusement in the Adirondacks. I had nothing to do with it. None of us but you will ever go there.”

This was most exasperating. I can’t account for my leaping into such a trap, except on the theory that my preoccupation with the railway matters must have made me forget ordering that item into my domestic accounts instead of into my personal accounts down-town. Of course, my contention of my family’s extravagance was sound. But I had seemed to give the whole case away, had destroyed the effect of all I had said, and, as I glanced at my wife, I saw a triumphant, contemptuous smile in her eyes. “You are always trying to punish some one else for your own sins,” she said. “The truth is that the only truly prodigal member of the family is yourself.”

Me prodigal with my own wealth! But I did not answer her. One is at a hopeless disadvantage in discussion with a woman. They are insensible to reason and logic except when they can gain an advantage by using them. It’s like having to keep to the rules in a game where your antagonist keeps to them or makes his own rules as it suits him. “Nevertheless,” I said, “the waste in my establishments must stop and your son James must come to his senses. It was about him that I came.”

“Poor boy—he’s had such a bad example all his life!” she said. “My dear, we have no right to judge him.”

I knew that she, like him, was throwing up to me my transactions with Judson. And like him, she was taking the petty, narrow view of them. “Madam,” I said, “your son is a liar, forger, and thief.”

Just then there came a knock at the door and James’s voice called: “May I come in, mother?”

“No, go away, Jim. Your father and I are busy,” she called in reply.

I went to the door and opened it, beside myself with fury. “Come in!” I exclaimed. “It’s business that concerns you.”

He entered—tall and strong, his handsome face graver than I had ever seen it before. He closed the door behind him and stood looking from one to the other of us. “Well?” he said, “but—no abuse!”

Whenever James and I have come face to face in a crisis I have always had the, to me, maddening feeling that a will as strong as my own has been lifting its head defiantly against me. My wife and my son Walter deal with me by evasion and slippery trickery. My daughter Aurora wins from me, when I choose to let her, by cajolery or tears. Little Helen has never yet had to do with me in a serious matter, and I cannot remember her ever a me even the trifling favours which most children seek from their parents. But James has always played the high and haughty—and I am ashamed to think how often he has ridden me down and defeated me and gained his object. As I have looked upon him as entitled to peculiar consideration because I had planned for him one day to wear my mantle, he has had me at a disadvantage. But my indulgent conduct toward him only makes the blacker his conduct toward me.

“‘You liar—you forger!’”

As he stood there that day, looking so calm and superior, I can’t describe the conflict of pride in him and hatred of him that surged up in me. I lost control of myself. I clinched my fists and shook them in his face. “You liar! You forger! You conscienceless——”

His mother rushed between us. “I knew it! I knew it!” she wailed. “Ever since he was a baby, I knew this day would come. Oh, my God! James, my husband—James, my son!”

James lowered the hand he had lifted to strike me. His face was pale and his eyes were blazing hate at me—I saw his real feeling toward me at last. How could I have overlooked it so long?

“Who would ever think you were my father?” he asked, in a voice that sounded to me like an echo of my own. “You—with hate in your face—hate for the son whom you poisoned before he was born, whom you have been poisoning ever since with your example. You—my father!”

The young scoundrel had taunted me into that calm fury which is so dreadful that I fear it myself—for, when I am possessed by it, there is no length to which I would not go. Our wills had met in final combat. I saw that I must crush him—the one human being who dared to oppose me and defy me, and he my own child who should have been deferential, grateful, obedient, unquestioning. “But I am not your father,” I said. “In my will I had made you head of the family, had given you two-thirds of my estate. I shall write a revocation here—immediately. I shall make a new will to-morrow.”

If the blow crushed him, he did not show it. He did not even wince as he saw forty millions swept away from him. “As you please,” he said, putting scorn into his face and voice—as if I could be fooled by such a pretence. The man never lived who could scorn a tenth, or even a fortieth, of forty millions. “I came into this room,” he went on, “to tell you how ashamed I was of what I have done—how vile and low I have felt. I didn’t come to apologise to you, but to my—my mother and to myself in your presence. I am still ashamed of what I did, of what you made me do. Do you know why I did it? Because your money, your millions, have changed you from a man into a monster. This wealth has injured us all—yes, even mother, noble though she is. But you—it has made you a fiend. Well, I wished to be independent of you. You have brought me up so that I could not live without luxury. But you haven’t destroyed in me the last spark of self-respect. And I decided to make a play for a fortune of my own. I—broke my word and speculated. I overreached—I saw my one hope of freeing myself from slavery to you slipping from me. I—I—no matter. What did matter after I’d broken my word? And I was justly punished. I lost—everything.”

As he flung these frightful insults at me my calm fury grew cold as well. “You will leave the house within an hour,” I said. “Your mother will make your excuses to her guests—I shall spare you the humiliation of a public disowning. During my lifetime you shall have nothing from me—no, nor from your mother. I shall see to that. In my will I shall leave you a trifling sum—enough to keep you alive. I am responsible to society that you do not become a public charge. And you may from this day continue on your way to the penitentiary without hindrance from those who were your kin.”

As I finished, he smiled. His smile grew broader, and became a laugh. “Very well, ex-father,” he said; “there’s one inheritance you can’t rob me of—my mind. I’ll lop off its rotten spots, and I think what’s left will enable me to stagger along.”

“You imagine I’ll relent,” I went on, “but my days of weakness with you are over.”

“You—relent!” He smiled mockingly. “I’m not such a fool as to fancy that. Even if you had a heart, your pride wouldn’t let you. And I’m not sorry—just at this moment. Perhaps I shall be later—I’m fond of cash, and your pot for me was a big one. But just now I feel as if you were doing me a favour.” He drew a long breath. “God!” he exclaimed. “I’m free! In spite of myself, I’m free! I’m a man at last!”

I did not care to listen to any more of the frothings of the silly young fool. Already I was regarding him as a stranger, was turning to his brother Walter as a possible successor to him and my principal heir. I left the room and went for a walk with my daughter and Natalie Bradish. When we returned he was gone. I sent for Walter and told him the news.

“Your brother has forfeited everything,” I said, in conclusion. “It remains for you to prove yourself worthy of the place I had designed for him. In the will I shall make to-morrow my estate will be divided equally among my three children, your mother getting her dower rights. If you do not show the qualities I hope, the will shall stand. If you do, I shall make another, giving you your own share plus what I had intended for James.”

Walter is a square-shouldered youth of medium height, with irregular, rather commonplace features, a rough skin, and an unpleasant habit of shifting his eyes rapidly round and round yours as you talk with him—I am as impartial a judge of my own family as a stranger would be. Walter has been a good deal of a sneak all his life—at least, he was up to the time when a man’s real character disappears behind the pose he adopts to face and fool the world with. “I don’t know what to say, sir,” he said to me now. “I’d plead for my brother, only that you are just and must have done what was right. I don’t know how to thank you for the chance you’re giving me. I can’t hope to come up to your standards, but I’ll just keep on trying to do my best to please you and show my gratitude to you. I always have been very proud of being your son. It will make me doubly proud if I can win your confidence so that you will select me as head of our family if it should ever need another head. But all that’s too far away to think about.”

I was much pleased by the modesty and sound sense of what he said, and from that moment have been taking a less unfavourable view of him. Indeed, it seems to me that I was unjust to him in my partiality for his brother. I exaggerated Jim’s impudence into courage, Walter’s diplomacy into cringing cowardice. This is another illustration of how careful a man should be not to let his hopes and desires blind him. I had been refusing to see what a wretched, untrustworthy scoundrel James was, all because I wished my elder son and namesake to be my principal heir and had made up my mind that he must be worthy of the honour.

There was only one point left unguarded—lest his mother should, in her weakness for her first-born, secretly supply him with money. I might have been powerless to prevent this, though I had determined to take from her all power over the domestic expenditures and put it in the hands of Burridge, in order that she might have as few spare dollars as possible. I knew I could count on her not sacrificing her personal vanity to keep him in funds. But with characteristic folly James shut his one door upon himself and spared me the trouble of watching his mother.

She came to town Thursday last and sent for me. I went up to the house for luncheon with her. As soon as she heard that I was there she joined me in the library. Her face was stern and hard. “Read this,” she said, handing me a letter. It was in James’s handwriting:

Mother dear: You don’t know Theodora, or you couldn’t have written what you did about her. You will love her—no one can help loving her who knows her. We were married this morning. When will you come and let me show her what a beautiful, good mother I have? I know you’ll come as soon as ever you can.

Jim.

“Theodora?” I said—I couldn’t imagine whom he had induced to share his poverty.

“Theodora Glendenning,” she replied.

“The miserable boy!” I exclaimed, forgetting for an instant that he is nothing to me. Theodora Glendenning was a widow, an adventuress from heaven knows where. She had obtained a slight footing in fairly good New York society a few years before, as a young girl, and had been invited to one or two first-class houses. She was good-looking, had the ways and voice of a siren, and a certain plausible sweetness and gentleness. She trapped young Nick Glendenning. His family promptly cast him off and they sank into obscurity, living on the income of the few hundred thousands he had inherited from a grandaunt. Then he died. We did not know where or how James met her.

“He wrote me on Tuesday,” said my wife, “that he’d been engaged to Theodora for six months. It is infamous. I wrote him that, if he sacrificed all his chances for position and recognition in New York by marrying an adventuress, he needn’t expect me to do anything for him.”

“Now you realise that I knew what I was about when I shook him off,” I said.

“Yes, James. And after all the care I gave him, after all I did for him! To defy me, to trample on my love, and marry that worthless nobody with her beggarly income! I had arranged for him to marry Natalie Bradish. She’d have helped us with her splendid family.”

I smiled. “She wouldn’t have had him, my dear,” I said; “she will marry Walter.”

“No—she would have married James. She was crazy about him.”

This amazed me—women are always thinking each other sentimental, yet every woman ought to know that at bottom all women are sensible and never take their eyes off the main chance. But I said nothing. I was too well content with matters as they stood. Women are so perverse that had I joined her just then in attacking James she might have veered round to him again on impulse.

Now that he has thwarted her ambitions for him, and for herself through him, she will be bitter in her hate where I shall be calm in mine. She had her whole heart in the social strength she was to gain by his making a brilliant marriage. He has crushed her heart, has killed the affection she had for him. She would have forgiven him anything but a wife offensive to her.

I don’t altogether like the idea of this sort of mother love. Men should be just; but women should be merciful and loving. New York and wealth and the social struggle have made her too hard. However, I’m not quarrelling seriously with what works so admirably for my purpose as to James. Our common disaster in him will draw us nearer together than we have been for years—at least until the next wrangle over an expense account. For years we have had opposite interests—I, to restrain her; she, to outwit me. Now we again have a common interest, and it is common interest that makes husband and wife live together in harmonious peace.

Nothing happens with me as with ordinary human beings. What could be stranger than that my new era of domestic quiet should be founded, not upon love or affection or feelings of that sort, but upon hate—upon my and her common hate for our unworthy elder son?

III

It has been two years and five months since I expelled James, yet my dissatisfaction with Walter has not decreased.

No doubt this is due in part to the grudge a man of my age who loves power and wealth must have against the impatient waiter for his throne and sceptre. No doubt, also, age and long familiarity with power have made me, perhaps, too critical of my fellow-beings and too sensitive to their shortcomings. But, after all allowances, I have real ground for my feeling toward Walter.

My principal heir and successor, who is to sustain my dignity after I am gone, and to maintain my name in the exalted position to which my wealth and genius have raised it, should have, above all else, two qualifications—character and an air of distinction.

Walter has neither.

My wife defends him for his lack of distinction in manner and look by saying that I have crushed him. “How could he have the distinction you wish,” she says, “when he has grown in the shadow of such a big, masterful, intolerant personality as yours?” There is justice in this. I admire distinction, or individuality, but at a distance. I cannot tolerate it in my immediate neighbourhood. There it tempts me to crush it. I suspect that it would have exasperated me even in one of my own flesh and blood. Indeed, at bottom, that may have had something to do with the beginnings of my break with James.

But whatever excuse there may be for Walter’s shifty, smirking, deprecating personality, which seems to me, at times, not a peg above the personality of a dancing-master, there is no excuse whatsoever for his lack of character.

I rarely talk to him so long as ten minutes without catching him in a lie—usually a silly lie, about nothing at all. In money matters he is not sensibly prudent, but downright miserly. That is not an unnatural quality in age, for then the time for setting the house in order is short. An avaricious young man is a monstrosity. I suppose that avarice is almost inseparable from great wealth, or even from the expectation of inheriting it. Just as power makes a man greedy of power, so riches make a man greedy of riches. But, granting that Walter has to be avaricious, why hasn’t he the wit to conceal it? It gives me no pleasure, nowadays, to give; in fact, it makes me suffer to see anything going out, unless I know it is soon to return bringing a harvest after its kind. Yet, I give—at least, I have given, and that liberally. Walter need not have made himself so noted and disliked for stinginess that he has been able to get into only one of the three fashionable clubs I wished him to join—and that one the least desirable.

His mother says he was excluded because the best people of our class resent my having elbowed and trampled my way into power too vigorously, and with too few “beg pardons,” and “if you pleases.” Perhaps my courage in taking my own frankly wherever I found it may have made his admission difficult, just as it has made our social progress slow. But it would not have excluded him—would not have made him patently unpopular where my money and the fear of me gains him toleration. A very few dollars judiciously spent would have earned him the reputation of a good fellow, generous and free-handed.

Your poor chap has to fling away everything he’s got to get that name, but a rich man can get it for what, to him, is a trifle. By means of a smile or a dinner I’d have to pay for anyhow, or perhaps by allowing him to ride a few blocks beside me in my brougham or victoria, I send a grumbler away trumpeting my praises. I throw an industry into confusion to get possession of it, and then I give a twentieth of the profits to some charity or college; instead of a chorus of curses, I get praise, or, at worst, silence. The public lays what it is pleased to call the “crime” upon the corporation I own; the benefaction is credited to me personally.

Nor has Walter the excuse for his lying and shifting and other moral lapses that a man who is making his way could plead.

I did many things in my early days which I’d scorn to do now. I did them only because they were necessary to my purpose. Walter has not the slightest provocation. When his mother says, “But he does those things because he’s afraid of you,” she talks nonsense. The truth is that he has a moral twist. It is one thing for a clear-sighted man of high purpose and great firmness, like myself, to adopt indirect measures as a temporary and desperate expedient; it’s vastly different for a Walter, with everything provided for him, to resort to such measures voluntarily and habitually.

Sometimes I think he must have been created during one of my periods of advance by ambuscade.

How ridiculous to fall out with honesty and truth when there’s any possible way of avoiding it! To do so is to use one’s last reserves at the beginning of a battle instead of at the crisis.

However, it’s Walter or nobody. I cannot abandon my life’s ambition, the perpetuation of my fortune and fame in a family line. Next to its shortness, life’s greatest tragedy for men of my kind is the wretched tools with which we must work. All my days I’ve been a giant, doing a giant’s work with a pygmy’s puny tools. Now, with the end—no, not near, but not so far away as it was—

Just as I got home from the Chamber of Commerce dinner two weeks ago to-night, my wife was coming down to go to Mrs. Garretson’s ball. The great hall of my house, with its costly tapestries and carpets and statuary, is a source of keen pleasure to me. I don’t think I ever enter it, except when I’m much preoccupied, that I don’t look round and draw in some such satisfaction as a toper gets from a brimming glass of whiskey. But, for that matter, all the luxuries and comforts which wealth gives me are a steady source of gratification. The children of a man who rose from poverty to wealth may possibly—I doubt it—have the physical gratification in wealth blunted. But the man who does the rising has it as keen on the last day of healthy life as on the first day he became the owner of a carriage with somebody in his livery to drive him.

As my wife came down the wide marble stairs the great hall became splendid. I had to stop and admire her, or, rather, the way she shone and sparkled and blazed, becapped and bedecked and bedraped with jewels as she was. I have an eye that sees everything; that’s why I’m accused of being ferociously critical. I saw that there was something incongruous in her appearance—something that jarred. A second glance showed me that it was the contrast between her rubies and diamonds, in bands, in clusters, and in ropes, and her fading physical charms. She is not altogether faded yet—she is fifty to my sixty-four—and she has been for years spending several hours a day with masseuses, complexion-specialists, hair-doctors, and others of that kind. But she has reached the age where, in spite of doctoring and dieting and deception, there are many and plain signs of that double tragedy of a handsome, vain woman’s life—on the one hand, the desperate fight to make youth remain; on the other hand, the desperate fight to hide from the world the fact that it is about to depart for ever.

Naturally it depressed me that I could no longer think with pride of her beauty, and of how it was setting off my wealth. I must have shown what I was thinking, for she looked at me, first with anxious inquiry, then with frightened suspicion, as if guessing my thoughts.

Poor woman! I felt sorry for her.

Her life, for the past twenty years, has been based wholly on vanity. The look in my face told her, perhaps a few weeks earlier than she would have learned it from her mirror or some malicious bosom friend, that the basis of her life was swept away, and that her happiness was ended. She hurried past me, spoke savagely to the four men-servants who were jostling one another in trying to help her to her carriage, and drove away in her grandeur to the ball, probably as miserable a creature as there was on Manhattan Island that night.

I went up to my apartment, half depressed, half amused—I have too keen a sense of humour not to be amused whenever I see vanity take a tumble. As I reached my sitting-room I was in the full swing of my moralisings on the physical vanity of women, and on their silliness in setting store by their beauty after it has served its sole, legitimate, really useful purpose—has caught them husbands. Only mischief can come of beauty in a married woman. She should give it up, retire to her home, and remain there until it is time for her to bring out and marry off her grown sons and daughters. If my wife hadn’t been handsome she might have done this, and so might have continued to shine in her proper sphere—the care of her household and her children, the comfort of her husband.

As I reached this point in my moralisings I caught sight of my own face by the powerful light over my shaving glass.

I’ve never taken any great amount of interest in my face, or anybody else’s. I’ve no belief in the theory that you can learn much from your adversary’s expression. In a sense, the face is the map of the mind. But the map has so many omissions and mismarkings, all at important points, that time spent in studying it is time wasted. My plan has been to go straight along my own line, without bothering my head about the other fellow’s plans—much less about his looks. I think my millions prove me right.

As I was saying, I saw my face—suddenly, with startling clearness, and when my mind was on the subject of faces. The sight gave me a shock—not because my expression was sardonic and—yes, I shall confess it—cruel and bitterly unhappy. The shock came in that, before I recognised myself, I had said, “Who is this old man?”

The glass reflected wrinkles, bags, creases, hollows—signs of the old age of a hard, fierce life.

Curiously, my first comment on myself, seen as others saw me, was a stab into my physical vanity—not a very deep stab, but deep enough to mock my self-complacent jeers at my wife. Then I went on to wonder why I had not before understood the reason for many things I’ve done of late.

For example, I hadn’t realised why I put five hundred thousand dollars into a mausoleum. I did it without the faintest notion that my instinctive self was saying, “You’d better see to it at once that you’ll be fittingly housed—some day.” Again, I hadn’t understood why it was becoming so hard for me to persuade myself to keep up my public gifts.

I have always seen that for us men of great wealth gifts are not merely a wise, but a vitally necessary, investment.

Jack Ridley insists that I exaggerate the envy the lower classes feel for us. “You rich men think others are like yourselves,” he says. “Because all your thoughts are of money, you fancy the rest of the world is equally narrow and spends most of its time in hating you and plotting against you. Why, the fact is that rich men envy one another more than the poor envy them.” There’s some truth in this. The fellow with one million enviously hates the fellow with ten; as for most fellows with twenty or thirty, they can hardly bear to hear the fellows with fifty or sixty spoken of. But, in the main, Jack is wrong. I’ve not forgotten how I used to feel when I had a few hundred a year; and so I know what’s going on in the heads of people when they bow and scrape and speak softly, as they do to me. It means that they’re envying and are only too eager to find an excuse for hating. They want me to think that they like me.

I used to give chiefly because I liked the fame it brought me—also, a little, because it made me feel that I was balancing my rather ruthless financial methods by doing vast good with what many would have kept selfishly to the last penny. Latterly my chief motive has been more substantial; and I wonder how I could have let wealth-hunger so blind me, as it has in the past four or five years, that I have haggled over and cut my public gifts.

The very day after I saw my face in the mirror I definitely committed myself to my long tentatively promised gift of an additional four millions to the university which bears my name. I also arranged to get those four millions—but that comes later. Finally, I began to hasten my son Walter’s marriage to Natalie Bradish.

My son Walter!

It certainly isn’t lack of shrewdness that unfits him to be head of the family. Why do the qualities we most admire in ourselves, and find most useful there, so often irritate and even disgust us in another?

I have not told him that he is already the principal heir under the terms of my will. He will work harder to please me so long as he thinks the prize still withheld—still to be earned. He does not know how firmly my mind is set against James. So he never loses an opportunity to clinch my purpose. One day last week, in presence of his sister Aurora, I was reproving him for one of his many shortcomings, and, to enforce my reproof, was warning him that such conduct did not advance him toward the place from which his brother had been deposed.

His upper lip always twitches when he is about to launch one of those bits of craftiness he thinks so profound. The longer I live, the deeper is my contempt for craft—it so rarely fails to tangle and strangle itself in its own unwieldy nets. After his lip had twitched awhile, he looked furtively at Aurora. I looked also, and saw that she was a partner in his scheme, whatever it was.

“Well!” said I, impatiently, “what is it? Speak out!”

“You spoke of the position James lost,” he forced himself to say; “there wasn’t any such place, was there, Aurora?”

“No,” she answered; “James was deceiving you right along.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

Aurora looked nervously at Walter, and he said: “James often used to talk to us about your plans, and he always said that he wouldn’t let you make him your principal heir. He said he would disregard your will and would just divide the money up, giving a third to mother and making all us children equal heirs with him.”

It is amazing how the most astute man will overlook the simplest and plainest dangers. In all my thinking and planning on the subject of founding a family. I had never once thought of the possibility of my will being voluntarily broken by its chief beneficiary.

“What reason did he give?” I asked, for I could conceive no reason whatsoever.

Aurora and Walter were silent. Walter looked as if he wished he had not launched his torpedo at James.

“What reason, Aurora?” I insisted.

She flushed and stammered: “He said he—he didn’t want to be hated by mother and the rest of us. He said we’d have the right to hate him, and couldn’t help it if he should be low enough to profit by your—your——”

“My—what?”

“Your heartlessness.”

“And do you think my plan was heartless?” I asked.

“No,” said Aurora, but I saw that she thought “Yes.”

“You’ve a right to do as you wish with your own,” said Walter. “We know you’ll do what is for the best interest of us all. Even if you should leave us nothing, we’d still be in your debt. You owe us nothing, father. We owe you everything.”

Although this was simply a statement of a truth which I hold to be fundamental, it irritated me to hear him say it. I know too well what havoc self-interest works in the sense of right and wrong, and Walter would be the first of my children to insult my memory if he were to get less by a penny than any other of the family. Had I been concerning myself about what my wife and my children would think of me after I was gone, I should never have entertained the idea of founding a family. But men of large view and large wealth and large ambition do not heed these minor matters. When it comes to human beings, they deal in generals, not in particulars.

A fine world we should have if the masters of it consulted the feelings of those whom destiny compels them to use or to discard.

I looked at this precious pair of plotters satirically. “Naturally,” said I, “you never spoke to me of James’s purpose so long as there was a chance of your profiting by his intended treachery to me.” Then to Aurora I added: “I understand now why, for several months after James left, you persisted in begging me to take him back.”

Aurora burst into tears. As tears irritate me, I left the room. Thinking over the scandalous exhibition of cupidity which these children of mine had given, I was almost tempted to tear up my will and make a new one creating a vast public institution that would bear my name, and endowing it with the bulk of my wealth. I have often wondered why an occasional man of great wealth has done this. I now have no doubt that usually it has been because he was disgusted by the revolting greediness of his natural heirs. If rich men should generally adopt this course, I suspect their funerals would have less of the air of sunshine bursting through black clouds—it’s particularly noticeable in the carriages immediately behind the hearse.

Jack Ridley says my sense of humour is like an Apache’s. Perhaps that’s why the idea of a posthumous joke of this kind tickles me immensely. Were I not a serious man, with serious purposes in the world, I might perpetrate it.

The net result of Walter and Aurora’s effort to advance themselves—I wonder what Walter promised Aurora that induced her to aid him?—was that I formed a new plan. I resolved that Walter should marry at once. As soon as he has a male child I shall make a new will leaving it the bulk of my estate, and giving Walter only the control of the income for life—or until the child shall have become a man thirty years old.

That evening I ordered him to arrange with Natalie for a wedding within two months. I knew he would see her at the opera, as my wife had invited her to my box. I intended to ask him in the morning what he and she had settled upon, but before I had a chance I saw in my paper a piece of news that put him and her out of my mind for the moment.

James, so the paper said, was critically ill with pneumonia at his house in East Sixty-third Street, near Fifth Avenue. He has lived there ever since he was married, and has kept up a considerable establishment. I am certain that his wife’s dresses and entertainments are part of the cause of my wife’s rapid aging. Really, her hatred of that woman amounts to insanity. It amazes me, used as I am to the irrational emotions of women. I could understand her being exasperated by the social success of James and his wife. I confess that it has exasperated me—almost as much as has his preposterous luck in Wall Street. But there is undeniably a better explanation than luck for his and her social success. They say she has beauty and charm, and her entertainments show originality and talent, while my wife’s are commonplace and dull, in spite of the money she lavishes. But, in addition to those reasons, there are many of the upper-class people who hate me. Mine is a pretty big omelet; there is a lot of eggs in it; and, with every broken egg, somebody, usually somebody high up, felt robbed or cheated.

But I did not trust to my wife’s insane hate for James’s wife to keep her away from her son in his illness. I went straight to her. “I see that James is ill, or pretends to be,” I said. “Probably he and his wife are plotting a reconciliation.”

My wife has learned to mask her feelings behind a cold, expressionless face; but she has also learned to obey me. She often threatens, but she dares not act. I know it—and she knows that I know it.

“You will not go to him under any circumstances,” I went on—“neither you nor any of the rest of us. If you disobey, I shall at once rearrange my domestic finances. Thereafter you will go to Burridge for money whenever you want to buy so much as a paper of pins.”

She was white—perhaps with fury, perhaps with dread, perhaps with both. I said no more, but left her as soon as I saw that she did not intend to reply. Toward six o’clock that evening I met Walter in the main hall of the first bedroom floor. He was for hurrying by me, but I stopped him. I have an instinct which tells me unerringly when to ask a question.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

He shifted from leg to leg; he, like most people, is never quite at ease in my presence; when he is trying to conceal some specific thing from me he becomes a victim of a sort of suppressed hysteria. “To the drawing-room,” he answered.

“Who’s there?” said I.

He shivered, then blurted it out: “James’s wife.”

“Why didn’t you tell me in the first place?”

He stammered: “I—wished to—to spare you—the——”

“Bah!” I interrupted. As if I could not read in his face that her coming had roused his fears of a reconciliation with James! “What are you going to say to her?”

“A message from mother,” he muttered.

“Have you seen your mother, or did you make up the message?”

“A servant brought mother her card and a note. I didn’t know she was in the house till mother sent for me and gave me the message to take down.”

“Will your mother see her?”

“No, indeed,” he replied, recovered somewhat; “mother won’t have anything to do with them.”

“Well, go on and deliver your message,” I said; “I’ll step into the little reception-room behind the drawing-room. See that you speak loud enough for me to hear every word.”

As I entered the reception-room, he entered the drawing-room. “Mother says,” he said—naturally, his voice was ridiculously loud and nervous—“that she has no interest in the information you sent her, and no acquaintance with the person to whom it relates.”

There was a silence so long that curiosity made me move within range of one of the long drawing-room mirrors. I saw her and Walter reflected, facing each other. She was so stationed that I had a plain view of her whole figure and of her face—the first time I had ever really seen her face. Her figure was drawn to its full height, and her bosom was rising and falling rapidly. Her head was thrown back, and upon poor Walter was beating the most contemptuous expression I ever saw coming from human eyes. No wonder even his back showed how wilted and weak he was.

As I watched, she suddenly turned her eyes; her glance met mine in the mirror. Before I could recover and completely drive the look of amusement from my face, she had waved Walter aside and was standing in front of me. “You heard what your son said!” she exclaimed; “what do you say?”

I liked her looks, and especially liked her voice. It was clear. It was magnetic. It was honest. When I wish to separate sheep from goats I listen to their voices, for voices do not often lie.

“I refuse to believe that he delivered my note to—to James’s mother.” There was a break in her voice as she spoke James’s name—it distinctly made my nerves tingle, unmoved though my mind was. “James is—is—” she went on, slowly, but not unsteadily—“the doctors say there’s no hope. And he—your son—sent me, and I am here when—when—but—what do you say?”

It is extraordinary what power there is in that woman’s personality. If Walter hadn’t been there I might have had to lash myself into a fury and insult her to save myself from being swept away. As it was, I looked at her steadily, then rang the bell. The servant came.

“Show this lady out,” I said, and I bowed and went to Walter in the drawing-room. I can only imagine how she must have felt. Nothing frenzies a woman—or a man—so wildly as to be sent away from a “scene” without a single insult given to gloat over or a single insult received to bite on.

The morning paper confirmed her statement of James’s condition. In fact, I didn’t have to wait until then, for toward twelve that night I heard the boys in the street bellowing an “extra” about him—that he was dying, and that none of his family had visited him. Those whose sense of justice is clouded by their feelings will be unable to understand why I felt no inclination to yield. Indeed, I do not expect to be understood in this except by those of my class—the men whose large responsibilities and duties have forced them to put wholly aside those feelings in which the ordinary run of mankind may indulge without harm. I don’t deny that I had qualms. I can sympathise now with those kings and great men who have been forced to order their sons to death. And I have charged against James the pangs he then caused me.

In the superficial view it may seem inconsistent that, while I stood firm, I was shocked by my wife’s insensibility. I had to do my duty, but she should have found it impossible to do hers. I could not, of course, rebuke her and Aurora for not transgressing my orders; but all that night and all the next day I wondered at their hardness, their unwomanliness. It seemed to me another illustration of the painful side of wealth and position—their demoralising effect upon women.

The late afternoon papers announced—truthfully—a favourable change in James’s condition. In defiance of the doctors’ decree of death, he had rallied. “It is that wife of his,” I said to myself. “Such a personality is a match for death itself.” I had a sense of huge relief. Indeed, it was not until I knew James wasn’t going to die that I realised how hard a fight my parental instinct had made against duty.

If I had liked Walter better I should not have been thus weak about James.

When I reached home and was about to undress for my bath and evening change, my daughter Helen knocked and entered. “Well?” said I.

She stood before me, tall and slim and golden brown—the colour is chiefly in her hair and lashes and brows, but there is a golden brown tinge in her skin; as for her eyes, they are more gold than brown, I think. Her dress reaches to her shoe-tops. With her hands clasped in front of her, she fixed her large, serious eyes upon me.

“I went to see James this morning,” she said; then seemed to be waiting—not in fear, but in courage—for my vengeance to descend.

I scowled and turned away to hide the satisfaction this gave me. At least there is one female in my family with a woman’s heart!

“Who put you up to it?” I demanded, sharply.