Tutt regretfully.

"Why 'in that case'?" queried his partner.

"Oh, the son isn't so much of a much!" replied the smaller Tutt. "I
don't say the father was so much of a much, either. Payson Clifford was
a good fellow--even if he wasn't our First Citizen--or likely to be a
candidate for that position in the Hereafter. But that boy--"

"Shh!" reproved Mr. Tutt, slowly shaking his head so that the smoke from
his rat-tailed cigar wove a gray scroll in the air before his face.
"Remember that there's one thing worse than to speak ill of the dead,
and that's to speak ill of a client!"

Mr. Payson Clifford, the client in question, was a commonplace young
man who had been carefully prepared for the changes and chances of this
mortal life first at a Fifth Avenue day school in New York City,
afterwards at a select boarding school among the rock-ribbed hills of
the Granite State, and finally at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the
cultured atmosphere of Harvard College, through whose precincts, in the
dim, almost forgotten past, we are urged to believe that the good and
the great trod musingly in their beautiful prime. He emerged with a
perhaps almost prudish distaste for the ugly, the vulgar, and the
unclean,--and with distinct delusions of grandeur. He was still in that
state not badly described by the old saw--"You can always tell a Harvard
man,--but you can't tell him much."

His mother had died when he was still a child and he preserved her
memory as the most sacred treasure of his inner shrine. He could just
recall her as a gentle and dignified presence, in contrast with whom his
burly, loud-voiced father had always seemed crass and ordinary. And
although it was that same father who had, for as long as he could
remember, supplied him with a substantial check upon the first day of
every month and thus enabled him to achieve that exalted state of
intellectual and spiritual superiority which he had in fact attained,
nevertheless, putting it frankly in the vernacular, Payson rather looked
down on the old man, who palpably suffered from lack of the advantages
which he had furnished to his son.

Payson, Sr., had never taken any particular pains to alter his son's
opinion of himself. On the whole he was more proud of him than
otherwise, recognizing that while he obviously suffered from an
overdevelopment of the ego and an excessive fastidiousness in dress, he
was, at bottom, clearly all right and a good sort. Still, he was forced