story, even at its highest, will not throw
millions on the habituated and indifferent air; nor, at its most
distended, will it push the pride of life too far. That has been done
already in sufficing measure by many others. Let us ride here an even
keel and keep well within rule and reason.

I am simply to tell you how, as the years moved on, John McComas climbed
the stairs of life from the bottom to the top--or so, at least, he was
commonly considered to have done; and how, through the same years,
Raymond Prince passed slowly and reluctantly along the same stairs from
top to bottom--or so his critics usually regarded his course. Nor
without some color of justice, I presume that they will pass each other
somewhere near the middle of my volume.

III

In 1873 James Prince was living in a small, choice residential district
near the Lake. Its choiceness was great, but was not duly guarded. The
very smallness of the neighborhood--a triumphant record of early
fortunes--put it upon a precarious basis: there was all too slight a
margin against encroachments. And, besides, the discovery came to be
made, some years later, that it was upon the wrong side of the river
altogether. But it held up well in 1873; and it continued to do so
through the eighties. Perhaps it was not until the middle or later
nineties that the real exodus began. Some of the early magnates had
died; some had evaporated financially; others had come to perceive,
either for themselves or through their children, that the road to social
consideration now ran another way. In due course a congeries of bulky
and grandiose edifices, built lavishly in the best taste of their own
day, remained to stare vacantly at the infrequent passer-by, or to
tremble before the imminent prospect of sinking to unworthy uses: odd,
old-time megatheriums stranded ineptly in their mortgage-mud. But
through the seventies the neighborhood held up its head and people came
from far to see it.

James Prince lived in one of these houses; and, around the corner, old
Jehiel Prince lingered on in another.

James was, of course, Raymond's father. Jehiel was his grandfather.
Raymond, when we take him up, was at the age of thirteen. And Johnny
McComas, if you care to know, was close on twelve.

Jehiel Prince was of remote New England origin, and had come West by way
of York State. He had been born somewhere between Utica and Rochester.
He put up his house on no basis of domestic sociability;