of the case sink in. "Later I was
chairman of the committee that requested him to leave the Tremont
Club. And still later, when his swindle on the exchange came to light,
I helped his father hush the matter up. He was a bad lot."

"Yes," his son answered slowly. "An unusually bad lot. He is rotten!"

"Of course, besides the scandals we have mentioned there were,
probably are, others with women. What you say about the children shows
how impoverished is the blood. The son could hardly end otherwise. You
have given him a new soil to grow in, but the end must be there!"

The old man pointed stiffly to the street. Jarvis Thornton made no
reply. Presently his father continued:

"They were not transplanted in time. They are degenerate Puritans.
There are a great many like them, who have petered out on the stony
farms, or in little clerkships, or in asylums of one sort or another.
The stock was too finely bred in and in, over and over, for three
hundred years nearly. Insanity and vice have been hoarded and
repressed and passed on." He seemed to speak with personal bitterness.

"We have the taint of scrofula, of drink, of insanity, all covered up.
Those were wisest who scattered themselves forty years ago into new
lands. Then the magnificent old stock took a new life. It would not be
too much to say that wherever we find good life, hope, joy, or
prosperity in our broad country, you may trace it all back to New
England."

The son listened wonderingly to this essay on the Puritan stock.

"But I don't believe in it," the young man protested. "I don't believe
that it is good science or good morals to hang about our necks this
horrid millstone of heredity."

His father continued in his impartial tone. "You know how much of that
rotten stuff is in our family. You remember the Sharps, and the
Dingleys, and the Abraham Clarkes. You know your mother died from
sheer exhaustion," the old man trembled, "and I have been spared for a
fairly useless life by constant patching up. The war didn't knock me
up only----"

"I will not believe it!" Jarvis Thornton uttered, in intense tones.
His father sighed.

"And by some fortune you were spared; you have grown up strong and
sound and equable. I led your interests to the line of work you have
chosen, for a purpose----"

He paused again. "In order that sex, mere sex, might have no special
unhealthy fascination for you; that you might meet these problems and
treat them as judiciously as