Before leaving his house for good and all, Raymond spent a dismal fortnight in going over old papers—out-of-date documents which once had interested his father and grandfather, books, diaries and memoranda which had occupied his own youthful days: the slowly deposited, encumbering sediment of three generations, long in one place. There were several faded agreements with the signature of the ineffable individual who had married into the family, had received a quit-claim to those suburban acres, and had then, at a point of stress, refused to give them back. There were sheaves of old receipted bills—among them one for the set of parlor furniture in the best (or the worst) style of the Second Empire. There were drafts of Raymond's early compositions—his first attempts at the essay and the short story; there was an ancient, heavily annotated Virgil (only six books), and there was a sheepskin algebra in which he had taken, by himself, a post-school course as a means of intellectual tonic, with extra problems dexterously worked out and inserted on bits of blue paper....

"I filled the furnace seven times," he said to me, laconically.

I myself felt the strain of it all. It is less wearing to move every two or three years, as most of us do, than to move but once—near the end of a long life, of a succession of lives.

I never asked what Mr. Gluckstein thought of the orchestrion.

Raymond went to live at a sort of private hotel. Here he read and wrote. He carried with him a set of little red guide-books, long, long since out of date, and he restudied Europe in the light of early memories. He also subscribed to a branch of a public library in the vicinity—a vicinity that seemed on the far edge of things. However, the tendency of the town has always been centrifugal. Many of our worthies, if they have held on to life long enough, have had to make the same disconcerting trek.

From this retreat Raymond occasionally issued to concerts and picture-exhibitions. I do not know that he was greatly concerned for them; but they carried on a familiar tradition and gave employment still to a failing momentum.

From this same retreat there would issue, about the Christmas season, a few watercolors on Italian subjects. If they were faint and feeble, I shall not say so. We ourselves have one of them—an indecisive view of the ruins in the Roman Forum. It is not quite the Forum I recall; but then, as we know, the Roman Forum, for the past half-century, has altered almost from year to year.

Letters reached him occasionally from Albert the freshman. They might well have come from Albert the sophomore. Raymond showed me one of them on an evening when I had called to see him in his new quarters.

He was comfortable enough and snug. On the walls and shelves were books and pictures that I remembered seeing in his boyhood bedroom.

"I like it here," he said emphatically. And in truth it was the den of a born bachelor—one who had discovered himself too late.

Well, Raymond passed me Albert's letter. He showed it to me, not with pride, but (as was evident from the questioning eye he kept on my face) with a view to learning what I thought of it. He was asking a verdict, yet shrinking from it.

Albert was rather cocky; also, rather restless—I wondered if he would last to be a sophomore. And he displayed little of the consideration due a father. Clearly, Raymond, as a parent, had been weighed and found wanting. Albert's ideal stood high in another quarter, and his life's ambition might soon drive him in a direction the reverse of academic.

"How does it strike you?" asked Raymond, as I sat mulling over Albert's sheets.

I searched my mind for some non-committal response.

"Well," Raymond burst out, "he needn't respect me if he doesn't admire him!"