ct, my observation did seem
rather artificial and insincere.

II

By the time Raymond reached home, Johnny McComas had turned his informal
suburban enterprise into a "state" bank, with his father-in-law as
president and himself as cashier. The father-in-law lent his name and
furnished most of the capital; Johnny himself provided the driving
power. And by the time Raymond had become, through his father's death,
the head of the family and the controller of the family funds, Johnny
had turned his state bank into a national bank, with its offices in the
city and with himself as president; and he had bought--at a bargain--a
satisfactory house on the edge of the neighborhood where we first met
him. The street was marked for business advance more promptly and more
unmistakably than the precise quarter of the Princes. It would do as a
home for a few years. The transaction appealed both to McComas's thrift
and his pride. The coming of his new little bank, with its modest
capital, made no particular stir in the "street"; and the great group of
houses to the eastward were so apprehensive of open outrage, in one form
or another, that his approach, in a guise still social, provoked but
scant concern.

James Prince died when Raymond was about thirty. A careful, plodding man
who had never brought any direct difficulties upon himself, but who had
been worried--and worried out--through troubles left him by others. On
the whole, he had found life an unrewarding thing; and he passed along,
at fifty-five, with no great regrets. The tangle of family affairs had
finally been straightened out in considerable measure, though Raymond
found enough detail still left to make him realize what a five years his
father had passed through; and when, the year following, his mother
died, with the settlement of her estate almost overlapping the
settlement of his father's, he acquired a new sense of the grinding,
taxing possibilities of business. I speak from his own viewpoint; he was
susceptible--unduly, abnormally so--to the grind and the tax. After a
few months of clammy old Brand and his methods, he suddenly cut loose
from him (without waiting for him to die, as he did a little later); and
he told me that I was the man to wind up these tedious affairs. They
were not nearly so difficult and complicated as they seemed to him--they
were now largely routine matters, in fact; and I hope I carried things
along at a tempo which satisfied him. This is not