's whims. In his turn, as it had been with
his brothers by marriage, it was now the real preparatory school, with
college looming ahead.

By this time Raymond had completely made his belated adieux to aesthetic
concerns and had begun to concentrate on practical matters--on his own.
They needed his attention, even if he had not the right quality of
attention to give. I had my doubts, and they did not grow less as time
went on. Raymond was now within hail of fifty, and he added to his long
list of earlier mistakes a new mistake peculiar to his years and to his
training--or his lack of it.

Briefly, he assumed that age in itself brought knowledge, and that young
men in their twenties--even their late twenties--were but boys. The
disadvantage of holding this view became apparent when he began to do
business with them. He depended too much on his own vague fund of
experience, and did not realize how dangerous it might be to encounter
keen specialists--however young--in their own field. He was now engaged
in a general recasting of his affairs, and they came to him in
numbers--bright, boyish, young fellows, he called them. He tended to
patronize them, and he began to deal with them rather informally and
much too confidently.

The family bank, after languishing along for a liberal time under its
receiver, had been wound up, and the stockholders, among whom he was a
large one but far from the largest, accepted the results and turned wry
faces to new prospects elsewhere. The family holdings of real-estate, on
the edge of the central district rather than in it, did not share the
general and almost automatic advance in values, and an uncertain,
slow-moving scheme for a general public improvement--one that
continually promised to eventuate yet continually held off--had kept one
of his warehouses vacant for years: its only income was contributed by
an advertising company, which utilized part of its front as a
bulletin-board. Rents in this quarter kept down, though taxes--more
through rising rates than increased valuations--went up. And those two
big old houses! Raymond still lived, too expensively in one, and paid
interest on a cumbering old mortgage. The other--old Jehiel's--was
rented, at no great advantage, to a kind of correspondence school which
conducted dubious courses and was precarious pay.

In such circumstances Raymond began to lend an ear to offers of
"real-estate trades" and to suggestions for reinvestments. But
rea