welling. That would sound
like cant at this day. But the old fellows that used to say that had some
glimpses of the truth. They knew that it is the still, small voice that
the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom. I suppose I should have
to say that we didn't change at all. We develop. There's the making of
several characters in each of us; we are each several characters, and
sometimes this character has the lead in us, and sometimes that. From
what Fulkerson has told me of Dryfoos, I should say he had always had the
potentiality of better things in him than he has ever been yet; and
perhaps the time has come for the good to have its chance. The growth in
one direction has stopped; it's begun in another; that's all. The man
hasn't been changed by his son's death; it stunned, it benumbed him; but
it couldn't change him. It was an event, like any other, and it had to
happen as much as his being born. It was forecast from the beginning of
time, and was as entirely an effect of his coming into the world--"

"Basil! Basil!" cried his wife. "This is fatalism!"

"Then you think," he said, "that a sparrow falls to the ground without
the will of God?" and he laughed provokingly. But he went on more
soberly: "I don't know what it all means Isabel though I believe it means
good. What did Christ himself say? That if one rose from the dead it
would not avail. And yet we are always looking for the miraculous! I
believe that unhappy old man truly grieves for his son, whom he treated
cruelly without the final intention of cruelty, for he loved him and
wished to be proud of him; but I don't think his death has changed him,
any more than the smallest event in the chain of events remotely working
through his nature from the beginning. But why do you think he's changed
at all? Because he offers to sell me Every Other Week on easy terms? He
says himself that he has no further use for the thing; and he knows
perfectly well that he couldn't get his money out of it now, without an
enormous shrinkage. He couldn't appear at this late day as the owner, and
sell it to anybody but Fulkerson and me for a fifth of what it's cost
him. He can sell it to us for all it's cost him; and four per cent. is no
bad interest on his money till we can pay it back. It's a good thing for
us; but we have to ask whether Dryfoos has done us the good, or whether
it's the blessing of Heaven. If it's merely the blessing of Heaven, I
don't propose being grateful f