passed without a touch of sympathy the mild creatures that helped
deliver the laundry-bundles or the milk. Especially if they were white:
he was always sorry, he said, for white coats in a dirty town.

But such matters of advancing age are for the future.

II

As regards the affairs of McComas, I naturally had a lesser knowledge.
They were more numerous and more complicated; nor was I close to them. I
can only say that they went on prosperously, and continued to go on
prosperously: their success justified his concentration on them.

As regards his home and his domestic affairs, I can have more to say. My
wife and I called once or twice at their new house; with a daughter of
twenty-odd, there was no reason why we should not cultivate that
particular suburb, and every reason why we should.

Johnny's two sons were at home, briefly, as seniors who were soon to
graduate. They were tall, hearty lads, with some of their father's high
coloring. One of them was to be injured on the ball-field in his last
term, and to die at home a month later. The other, recovering some of
the individuality which a twin sometimes finds it none too easy to
assert, was to marry before he had been out of college six weeks--marry
young, like his father before him. The girl, young Althea, rather
resembling her mother,--her own mother,--was beginning to think less of
large hair-bows and more of longer dresses. Her father was quite wrapped
up in her and her stepmother seemed to take to her kindly.

Johnny, in conducting us over his house, laid great stress on her room.
On her suite, rather; or even on her wing. She had her own study, her
own bath, her own sleeping porch and sun-parlor. Everything had been
very delicately and richly done. And she had her own runabout in the
garage.

"The boys will go, of course," Johnny said to us, with his arm about his
daughter; "but our little Althea will be a good girl and not leave her
poor old father."

Ah, yes, girls sometimes have a way of lingering at home. Our own Elsie
has always remained faithful to her parents.

Johnny had chosen to call himself "old" and "poor." Of course he looked
neither. True, his chestnut hair was beginning to gray; but it made,
unless clipped closer than he always wore it, at least an intimation of
a florid aureole of crisp vigor; and his whole person gave an exudation
of power and prosperity. No sorrow had come to him beyond the death of
his parents--an inevitable loss