required of him.

His reference to Johnny McComas was designed, no doubt, to repel her;
but the effect, as became perfectly apparent, was quite the contrary.
She was interested, even fascinated, by the rise of a man from so little
to so much. She found words and words to express her admiration of
Johnny's type, and when English words ran short she found words in
French. He was _gaillard_; he had _elan_. What wasn't he? What hadn't
he? Bits of bravado, I still incline to think.

No, the McComases were not to be left behind all of a sudden. One day
she made another excursion to the outskirts with them; and she reported
it to Raymond, with a little air of suppressed mockery, as a perfectly
unobjectionable jaunt. She had gone with them to the cemetery. Johnny's
mother had died the year before, and he had been putting up a monument
in Roselands. This structure, it developed, was no mere memorial to an
individual. It was a tall shaft, set in the middle of a large lot. I saw
it later myself: a lavish erection (with all its accessory features
taken into account)--one designed, as I felt, to show Johnny himself to
posterity as an ancestor, as the founder of a family line. Assuredly his
own name, aside from the tall obelisk itself, was the largest thing in
view.

Raymond took this account of Johnny's latest phase with an admirable
seriousness; he thought the better of him for it. He himself was
inclined to divide human-kind into two classes, those who had
cemetery-lots (with monuments), and those who had not. The latter, of
course, are in a majority everywhere. One thinks of Naples and of the
sad road that winds up past the Alhambra to--Well, yes; in a majority,
of course; and inevitably so in a large town suddenly thrown together
by a heaping up of fortuitous and miscellaneous elements. In later
years, when things were going rather badly with Raymond, and when
consideration seemed to fail, he could always comfort himself with
thoughts of the Princes' own monument in that same cemetery. This was
another tall shaft in a gray granite now no longer to be found, and had
been set up by old Jehiel on the occasion of the reinterment of some
infants by his first wife--a transaction carried out years before
Raymond was born. Some of the dates on the base of the monument went
back to the early thirties. Well, there it stood, with the subordinated
headstones of Jehiel and old Beulah, of his own parents, and of the
half-mythical babes wh