“I dare say it isn’t, compared with Texas,” returned the father, smoking tranquilly on. “But I don’t suppose you find many of your friends in town outside of the club.”
“No; you’re requested to ring at the rear door, all the way down Beacon Street and up Commonwealth Avenue. It’s rather a blank reception for the returning prodigal.”
“Ah, the prodigal must take his chance if he comes back out of season. But I’m glad to have you back, Tom, even as it is, and I hope you’re not going to hurry away. You must give your energies a rest.”
“I’m sure you never had to reproach me with abnormal activity,” suggested the son, taking his father’s jokes in good part.
“No, I don’t know that I have,” admitted the elder. “You’ve always shown a fair degree of moderation, after all. What do you think of taking up next? I mean after you have embraced your mother and sisters at Mount Desert. Real estate? It seems to me that it is about time for you to open out as a real-estate broker. Or did you ever think of matrimony?”
“Well, not just in that way, sir,” said the young man. “I shouldn’t quite like to regard it as a career, you know.”
“No, no. I understand that. And I quite agree with you. But you know I’ve always contended that the affections could be made to combine pleasure and profit. I wouldn’t have a man marry for money—that would be rather bad—but I don’t see why, when it comes to falling in love, a man shouldn’t fall in love with a rich girl as easily as a poor one. Some of the rich girls are very nice, and I should say that the chances of a quiet life with them were rather greater. They’ve always had everything, and they wouldn’t be so ambitious and uneasy. Don’t you think so?”
“It would depend,” said the son, “upon whether a girl’s people had been rich long enough to have given her position before she married. If they hadn’t, I don’t see how she would be any better than a poor girl in that respect.”
“Yes, there’s sense in that. But the suddenly rich are on a level with any of us nowadays. Money buys position at once. I don’t say that it isn’t all right. The world generally knows what it’s about, and knows how to drive a bargain. I dare say it makes the new rich pay too much. But there’s no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age. It’s the thing that chiefly strikes the imagination. The Englishmen who come here are more curious about the great new millionaires than about anyone else, and they respect them more. It’s all very well. I don’t complain of it.”
“And you would like a rich daughter-in-law, quite regardless, then?”
“Oh, not quite so bad as that, Tom,” said his father. “A little youth, a little beauty, a little good sense and pretty behaviour—one mustn’t object to those things; and they go just as often with money as without it. And I suppose I should like her people to be rather grammatical.”
“It seems to me that you’re exacting, sir,” said the son. “How can you expect people who have been strictly devoted to business to be grammatical? Isn’t that rather too much?”
“Perhaps it is. Perhaps you’re right. But I understood your mother to say that those benefactors of hers, whom you met last summer, were very passably grammatical.”
“The father isn’t.”
The elder, who had been smoking with his profile toward his son, now turned his face full upon him. “I didn’t know you had seen him?”
“I hadn’t until today,” said young Corey, with a little heightening of his colour. “But I was walking down street this afternoon, and happened to look round at a new house someone was putting up, and I saw the whole family in the window. It appears that Mr. Lapham is building the house.”
The elder Corey knocked the ash of his cigarette into the holder at his elbow. “I am more and more convinced, the longer I know you, Tom, that we are descended from Giles Corey. The gift of holding one’s tongue seems to have skipped me, but you have it in full force. I can’t say just how you would behave under peine forte et dure, but under ordinary pressure you are certainly able to keep your own counsel. Why didn’t you mention this encounter at dinner? You weren’t asked to plead to an accusation of witchcraft.”
“No, not exactly,” said the young man. “But I didn’t quite see my way to speaking of it. We had a good many other things before us.”
“Yes, that’s true. I suppose you wouldn’t have mentioned it now if I hadn’t led up to it, would you?”
“I don’t know, sir. It was rather on my mind to do so. Perhaps it was I who led up to it.”
His father laughed. “Perhaps you did, Tom; perhaps you did. Your mother would have known you were leading up to something, but I’ll confess that I didn’t. What is it?”
“Nothing very definite. But do you know that in spite of his syntax I rather liked him?”
The father looked keenly at the son; but unless the boy’s full confidence was offered, Corey was not the man to ask it. “Well?” was all that he said.
“I suppose that in a new country one gets to looking at people a little out of our tradition; and I dare say that if I hadn’t passed a winter in Texas I might have found Colonel Lapham rather too much.”
“You mean that there are worse things in Texas?”
“Not that exactly. I mean that I saw it wouldn’t be quite fair to test him by our standards.”
“This comes of the error which I have often deprecated,” said the elder Corey. “In fact I am always saying that the Bostonian
