n times presently.

In the year 1916, then, Raymond Prince was standing to one side, whether
willing or not, while John W. McComas, attended by several men who would
make their cares his own, came down the big marble stairway of the
Mid-Continent National Bank. Raymond, who had his cares too, would
gladly have been included in the company (or, rather, have replaced it
altogether); but he saw clearly that the time was not propitious.
McComas looked out through this swarm of lesser people, half-saw Prince
as in a mist, and gave him unsmilingly an abstracted half-bow.

"How do you do?" he mumbled impersonally.

"I'm pretty well," returned Prince, in a toneless voice. But he was far
from that, whether in mind or estate.

Between these two dates and these two incidents lies most of my story.
Be quite sure that I shall tell it in my own fashion.

II

First, however, this: I do not intend to magnify the Academy and its
stairway. The Academy did very well in its day, and it happened to be
within easy distance of James Prince's residence. If its big green doors
were flanked on one side by a grocery and on the other by a laundry, and
if its stairway was worn untidily by other feet than those of Dr.
Grant's boys, I shall simply point out that this was all in the day of
small things and that Fastidiousness was still upon her way. Should this
not satisfy you, I will state that, in the year following, the Academy
moved into other quarters: it lodged itself in a near-by private
residence whose owner, in real estate, sensed down-heeled Decadence
stealing that way a few years before any of his neighbors felt it, and
who made his shifts accordingly. If even this does not satisfy you, I
might sketch the entrance and stairway, somewhere in Massachusetts,
which are to know the footfalls of Lawrence D. McComas, aged ten,
grandson of Johnny; but such a step would perhaps take us too far afield
as well as slightly into the future. One does not pass a lad through
_that_ gateway on the spur of the moment.

Nor ought I to magnify, on the other hand, the marble stairway of the
Mid-Continent. This was not one of the town's greater banks; and the
stairway was at the disposal not only of the bank's clientele, but at
that of sixteen tiers of tenants. However, it represented some advanced
architect's ideal of grandeur, and it served to make the bank's
president seem haughty when in truth he was only preoccupied.

As you may now surmise, this