statute books that his friend Watling couldn't
get 'round'? Why, you've got competition even among the churches. Yours,
where I believe you teach in the Sunday school, would go bankrupt if it
proclaimed real Christianity. And you'll go bankrupt if you practise
it, Perry, my boy. Some early, wide-awake, competitive, red-blooded bird
will relieve you of the Boyne Street car line."

It was one of this same new and "fittest" species who had already
relieved poor Mr. McAlery Willett of his fortune. Mr. Willett was a
trusting soul who had never known how to take care of himself or his
money, people said, and now that he had lost it they blamed him. Some
had been saved enough for him and Nancy to live on in the old house,
with careful economy. It was Nancy who managed the economy, who
accomplished remarkable things with a sum they would have deemed poverty
in former days. Her mother had died while I was at Cambridge. Reverses
did not subdue Mr. Willett's spirits, and the fascination modern
"business" had for him seemed to grow in proportion to the misfortunes
it had caused him. He moved into a tiny office in the Durrett Building,
where he appeared every morning about half-past ten to occupy himself
with heaven knows what short cuts to wealth, with prospectuses of
companies in Mexico or Central America or some other distant place:
once, I remember, it was a tea, company in which he tried to interest
his friends, to raise in the South a product he maintained would surpass
Orange Pekoe. In the afternoon between three and four he would turn up
at the Boyne Club, as well groomed, as spruce as ever, generally with a
flower in his buttonhole. He never forgot that he was a gentleman,
and he had a gentleman's notions of the fitness of things, and it was
against his principles to use, a gentleman's club for the furtherance of
his various enterprises.

"Drop into my office some day, Dickinson," he would say. "I think I've
got something there that might interest you!"

He reminded me, when I met him, that he had always predicted I would get
along in life....

The portrait of Nancy at this period is not so easily drawn. The decline
of the family fortunes seemed to have had as little effect upon her as
upon her father, although their characters differed sharply. Something
of that spontaneity, of that love of life and joy in it she had
possessed in youth she must have inherited from McAlery Willett,
but these qualities had disappeared in