for fifteen years now, and it seems an
infernally long time. Thirty-eight years!

"So they settled in England. I don't know whether you people can see it
plainly, but if you think a little you will realize how strange those
two felt in London, with their Saratoga trunks, their sea habits and
their American prejudices. Can you?"

He looked from one to the other as we sat there, our chairs twisted a
little so that we could see his face. The question was a shrewd one. I
remember wondering if he was aware how vividly it brought back to our
minds our first few weeks in San Francisco, our mistakes, our petulant
anger with strange habits, our feeling of awful homesickness. Again we
nodded silently.

"For a time they were up against it, you would say," he went on, "and
they didn't dare to move away from their lodgings in the East India Dock
Road. It was natural for my father to think he ought to live near the
ships. The custom of living in the suburbs, commuting as they call it
here, hadn't begun in the seventies. It was my mother who fired his
ambition to live further out. It would have been all right and
everything might have been different if his ambition hadn't been fired
in another direction at the same time.

"My father had done well on the whole. He had saved for years and kept
his money in banks or in ships, which he understood. But now, when the
_Erin's Isle_ was sold and he found himself worth about fifty thousand
dollars, he began to invest in all sorts of queer ventures. He wanted to
double his fortune before he died. Others had done it, men he met in
Leadenhall Street and on the Baltic; why shouldn't he? You see, he had
got hold of the _masculine_ part of my mother's ambition all right. She
wanted to have an establishment, like a lady; he wanted to found a
family in England. The money he was to make was for me. I was, he had
settled, to be an engineer. He saw, that with steel coming in,
engineering was to be the great gold-mine of the future. So he would
provide the capital by which I was to build up a huge fortune. The
Carvilles were to be big people, understand; '_my_ son was to be Prime
Minister some day,' Humph!"

There was no bitterness in the exclamation, only a veiled irony, a
detached amusement, at this memory of a dead ambition. We did not
interrupt.

"They moved out just a little way, to Mildmay Park. You must remember
that my father had no friends outside of business friends, and he had no
idea