"I've been thinking a
great deal, this last week, about Hiram Ranger."

Matilda, startled, gave him a wild look. "Charles!" she exclaimed.

"Exactly," said Whitney, a gleam of enjoyment in his dull eyes.

In fact, ever since Hiram's death his colossal figure had often dominated
the thoughts of Charles and Matilda Whitney. The will had set Charles to
observing, to _seeing_; it had set Matilda to speculating on the
possibilities of her own husband's stealthy relentlessness. At these
definite, dreadful words of his, her vague alarms burst into a deafening
chorus, jangling and clanging in her very ears.

"Arthur Ranger," continued Whitney, languid and absent, "has got out of
the beaten track of business--"

"Yes; look at Hiram's children!" urged Matilda. "Everybody that is
anybody is down on Arthur. See what his wife has brought him to, with her
crazy, upsetting ideas! They tell me a good many of the best people in
Saint X hardly speak to him. Yes, Charles, _look_ at Hiram's doings."

"Thanks to Hiram--what he inherited from Hiram and what Hiram had the
good sense not to let him inherit--he has become a somebody. He's doing
things, and the fact that they aren't just the kind of things I like
doesn't make me fool enough to underestimate them or him. Success is the
test, and in his line he's a success."

"If it hadn't been for his wife he'd not have done much," said
Matilda sourly.

"You've lived long enough, I'd think, to have learned not to say such
shallow things," drawled he. "Of course, he has learned from her--don't
everybody have to learn somewhere? Where a man learns is nothing; the
important thing is his capacity to learn. If a man's got the capacity to
learn, he'll learn, he'll become somebody. If he hasn't, then no man nor
no woman can teach him. No, my dear, you may be sure that anybody who
amounts to anything has got it in himself. And Arthur Ranger is a credit
to any father. He's becoming famous--the papers are full of what he's
accomplishing. And he's respected, honest, able, with a wife that loves
him. Would he have been anybody if his father had left him the money that
would have compelled him to be a fool? As for the girl, she's got a showy
streak in her--she's your regular American woman of nowadays--the kind of
daughter your sort of mother and my sort of damn-fool father breed up.
But Del's mother wasn't like you, Mattie, and she hadn't a fool father
like me, so she's married to a young fellow tha