autumn among the Wisconsin lakes, he was
formally claimed by Finance. There was no Franciscan ardor to clasp her
close, as others have clasped Poverty and Obedience. He began his
business career, as men have been recommended to begin their matrimonial
career, with a slight aversion. However, his aversion never brought him
any future good.

His year at home, so far as I could make out, was taken up largely with
aesthetics and music. He read the "Seven Lamps of Architecture" and they
lighted him along a road that led far, far from the constructional
practicalities of the yard where we had spent a Saturday forenoon, some
five years before. He had begun to collect books on the brickwork of
Piacenza and Cremona, and these too led him farther along the general
path of aestheticism. During our years at the Academy the town, after an
unprecedentedly thorough sweep by fire, had been rebuilding itself; and
on more than one Saturday forenoon of that period we had tramped
together through the devastated district, rejoicing in the restorative
activities on every hand and honestly admiring the fantasies and
ingenuities of the "architects" of the day. But Raymond had now emerged
from that innocent stage; summoning forth from some interior reservoir
of taste an inspirational code of his own, he condemned these crudities
and aberrations as severely as they probably deserved, and cultivated a
confident belief that somewhere or other he was to find things which
should square better with his likings and should respond more kindly to
his mounting sensibilities.

"Not going to cut us?" I once asked. "Just as we're picking up, too?"

But Raymond looked abstractedly into the distance and undertook no
definite reply. Possibly he had responded to Ruskin; more probably to
some divine young sense of truth and fitness such as forms the natural
endowment, by no means uncommon, of right-minded youth. Or it may be
that he had simply reached the "critical" age, when Idealism calls the
Daily Practicalities to its bar and delivers its harsh, imperious
judgments; when it puts the world, if but for a few brief months, "where
it belongs." His natural tendency toward generalization helped him
here--helped, perhaps, too much. He passed judgment not only on his
parents, whom he had been finding very unsatisfactory, and on most of
his associates (myself, for example, whenever I happened to speak an
appreciative word for his essentially admirable father), but