position with surprising fortitude.
After all, Aunt Caroline couldn't see him--and that was something.
Besides, it had been an adventure. It was surprising how he had come to
look for adventures since that day, five years ago, when the grim
adventure of war had called him from the peace-filled beginnings of
what he had looked forward to as a life of scholarly leisure. He had
been thirty, then, and quite done with adventuring. Now he was
thirty-five and--well, he supposed the war had left him restless.
Presently he would settle down. He would begin his great book on the
"Psychology of Primitive Peoples." Everything would be as it had been
before.

But in the meantime it insisted upon being somewhat different--hence
this feeling which was not all dissatisfaction with his present absurd
position. He was, he admitted it, a badly sold man. But did it matter?
What had he lost except money and self-esteem? The money did not matter
and he was sure that Aunt Caroline, at least, would say that he could
spare the self-esteem. Besides, he would recover it in time. His
opinion of himself as a man of perspicacity in business had recovered
from harder blows than this. There was that affair of the South
American mines, for instance,--but anybody may be mistaken about South
American mines. He had told Aunt Caroline this. "It was," he told Aunt
Caroline, "a financial accident. I do not blame myself. My father, as
you know, was a far-sighted man. These aptitudes run in families." Aunt
Caroline had said, "Humph!"

Nevertheless it was true that the elder Hamilton Spence, now deceased,
had been a far-sighted man. Benis had always cherished a warm
admiration for the commercial astuteness which he conceived himself to
have inherited. He would have been, he thought, exactly like his
father--if he had cared for the drudgery of business. So it was a habit
of his, when in a quandary, to consider what his parent would have done
and then to do likewise--an excellent rule if he had ever succeeded in
applying it properly. But there were always so many intruding details.
Take the present predicament, for instance. He could scarcely picture
his father in these precise circumstances. To do so would be to
presuppose actions on the part of that astute ancestor quite out of
keeping with his known character. Would Hamilton Spence, senior, have
crossed a continent at the word of one of whom he knew nothing, save
that he wrote an agreeable letter? Would he