that's one of Bromfield Corey's things. It
has nice qualities, but it's amateurish."

In process of time the money seemed less abundant. There were
shrinkages of one kind and another, and living had grown much more
expensive and luxurious. For many years he talked about going back to
Rome, but he never went, and his children grew up in the usual way.
Before he knew it his son had him out to his class-day spread at
Harvard, and then he had his son on his hands. The son made various
unsuccessful provisions for himself, and still continued upon his
father's hands, to their common dissatisfaction, though it was chiefly
the younger who repined. He had the Roman nose and the energy without
the opportunity, and at one of the reversions his father said to him,
"You ought not to have that nose, Tom; then you would do very well.
You would go and travel, as I did."

LAPHAM and his wife continued talking after he had quelled the
disturbance in his daughters' room overhead; and their talk was not
altogether of the new house.

"I tell you," he said, "if I had that fellow in the business with me I
would make a man of him."

"Well, Silas Lapham," returned his wife, "I do believe you've got
mineral paint on the brain. Do you suppose a fellow like young Corey,
brought up the way he's been, would touch mineral paint with a ten-foot
pole?"

"Why not?" haughtily asked the Colonel.

"Well, if you don't know already, there's no use trying to tell you."

VI.

THE Coreys had always had a house at Nahant, but after letting it for a
season or two they found they could get on without it, and sold it at
the son's instance, who foresaw that if things went on as they were
going, the family would be straitened to the point of changing their
mode of life altogether. They began to be of the people of whom it was
said that they stayed in town very late; and when the ladies did go
away, it was for a brief summering in this place and that. The father
remained at home altogether; and the son joined them in the intervals
of his enterprises, which occurred only too often.

At Bar Harbour, where he now went to find them, after his winter in
Texas, he confessed to his mother that there seemed no very good
opening there for him. He might do as well as Loring Stanton, but he
doubted if Stanton was doing very well. Then he mentioned the new
project which he had been thinking over. She did not deny that there
was something in it, but