ful name to her.

My second point must deal with Raymond's attitude toward me on my
wedding-day and on the days preceding it. He was stiff, constrained,
dissatisfied--merely courteous toward my Elsie, and not at all cordial
to me. I wondered whether he blamed me for thus bringing him back home;
but the real reason, as I came to understand later, was quite different.
He regarded the marriage of a friend as a personal deprivation, and the
bride as the chief figure in the conspiracy. After my defection, or
misappropriation, he solaced himself by trying to make one or two other
friendships. When these friends married in turn, like process produced
like results. These men, however, he threw overboard completely; in my
case, he showed, after a while, some relenting, and ultimately even
forgiveness. By the time he came to marry on his own account, the last
of his very few bachelor friends had "gone off"; so there was no chance
of inflicting on anybody that displeasure which others had several
times inflicted on him.

He sent Elsie a suitable present, and stood beside me through the
ceremony as graciously as he was able.

"I wish you both great joy," he said firmly, at the end; and it was six
weeks before we saw him in our little home.

PART IV

I

Johnny McComas was still carrying on his business life and his home life
in the suburb where he had married, when I came, finally, to make my
first call on the domestic group of which he was the nub. Still in the
future was the day when he was to move into town, and to have also a
summer home on the North Shore, and to make some of his father-in-law's
spare funds yield profitable results, and to arouse among wistful clerks
and unsuccessful "operators" an admiring wonder as the youngest
bank-president in the "Loop."

I looked in on him one evening in late November. I found a house too
emphatically furnished and a wife too concerned about making an
impression. I did not consider myself a young man of prime consequence
and did not relish the expenditure of so much effort: after all,
Johnny's standing, Johnny's wife, Johnny's domestic _entourage_ were
not before a judgment-bar. It was plain to see that for Mrs. John W.
McComas complete social comfort had not yet been reached, and I wondered
if the next move might not show it as farther away than ever.

Johnny himself was bluff and direct, and took things as a matter of
course. Much had been done, but more remained to be