By the time Raymond reached home, Johnny McComas had turned his informal suburban enterprise into a "state" bank, with his father-in-law as president and himself as cashier. The father-in-law lent his name and furnished most of the capital; Johnny himself provided the driving power. And by the time Raymond had become, through his father's death, the head of the family and the controller of the family funds, Johnny had turned his state bank into a national bank, with its offices in the city and with himself as president; and he had bought—at a bargain—a satisfactory house on the edge of the neighborhood where we first met him. The street was marked for business advance more promptly and more unmistakably than the precise quarter of the Princes. It would do as a home for a few years. The transaction appealed both to McComas's thrift and his pride. The coming of his new little bank, with its modest capital, made no particular stir in the "street"; and the great group of houses to the eastward were so apprehensive of open outrage, in one form or another, that his approach, in a guise still social, provoked but scant concern.

James Prince died when Raymond was about thirty. A careful, plodding man who had never brought any direct difficulties upon himself, but who had been worried—and worried out—through troubles left him by others. On the whole, he had found life an unrewarding thing; and he passed along, at fifty-five, with no great regrets. The tangle of family affairs had finally been straightened out in considerable measure, though Raymond found enough detail still left to make him realize what a five years his father had passed through; and when, the year following, his mother died, with the settlement of her estate almost overlapping the settlement of his father's, he acquired a new sense of the grinding, taxing possibilities of business. I speak from his own viewpoint; he was susceptible—unduly, abnormally so—to the grind and the tax. After a few months of clammy old Brand and his methods, he suddenly cut loose from him (without waiting for him to die, as he did a little later); and he told me that I was the man to wind up these tedious affairs. They were not nearly so difficult and complicated as they seemed to him—they were now largely routine matters, in fact; and I hope I carried things along at a tempo which satisfied him. This is not to deny that Raymond seemed to have days when he found even me dilatory and exasperating; but old Brand would probably have driven him mad.

Well, the prospects of his estate were not too brilliant. The lawsuits had been expensive and sometimes unsuccessful; the bank had passed a dividend, and the old houses, which had meant a lot of money in their day, meant less now and even loss in a near future. The time was fast coming when this circumscribed and unprotected neighborhood was to admit other—and prejudicial—interests: boarding-houses, of course; and refined homes for inebriates; and correspondence-schools for engineers; and one of the Prince houses became eventually the seat of a publishing-firm which needed a little distinction more than it needed a wide spread of glass close to the sidewalk.

Whatever the state of Raymond's fortunes, it was easy to see that they were not likely to improve in his hands. He detested business, both en gros and en dÉtail. Despite his ancestry, he seemed to have been born with no faculty for money-making, and he never tried to make up his deficiency. It was all of a piece with the stone-throwing of his boyhood days—he never attempted to improve himself: it was enough to follow the gifts with which he had been natively endowed. Precept, example, opportunity—all these went for naught. To the end of his days he viewed the American "business man" as a portentous and inexplicable phenomenon—one to be regarded with distaste and wonder. He persisted in thinking of the type as a juvenile one—an energetic and clever boy, who was immensely active and immensely productive of results (in an immensely limited field), but who was incapable of anything like an aperÇu or a Weltanschauung (oh, he had plenty of words for it!), and who was essentially booked to lose much more than he gained. He disliked "offices" and abominated "hours." I think that even my own modest professional applications sometimes became a puzzle to him....

And here I stand—convicted of having perpetrated another section without one short paragraph and without a single line of conversation. Let me hasten to bring Raymond to my suite and my desk-side, and make him speak.

He came down one morning, as administrator of his mother's estate, to consider the appraisal of the personal property—many familiar items, and some discouraging ones.

"Do you have to do this?" he asked me, with the paper in his hand. "Do you like to do it?"

"The world's work," I rejoined temperately. "It's got to be done."

"H'm!" he returned. "The world's a varied place. And its work is varied too. This blessed town must be taught that."

Was he girding himself to be one of its teachers?

From that time on I resolved to take him patiently and good-humoredly: a friend must bear a friend's infirmities.