spiritual understanding--"reconciliation" would be inaccurate--with his
son. So, Payson, Jr., protestingly acquired by part cash and balance
credit a complete suit of what he scathingly described as "the barbarous
panoply of death" and, turning himself into what he similarly called a
"human catafalque," followed Payson, Sr., to the grave.

Perhaps, after all, we have been a bit hard on Payson, Jr. He was
fundamentally, as his father had perceived, good stuff, and wanted to do
the right thing. But what is the right thing? Really it isn't half as
hard to be good as to know how.

As the orphaned Payson, ensconced in lonely state in one of the funeral
hacks, was carried at a fast trot down Broadway towards the offices of
Tutt & Tutt, he consoled himself for his loss with the reflection that
this was, probably, the last time he would ever have to see any of his
relatives. Never in his short life had he been face to face with such a
gathering of unattractive human beings. He hadn't imagined that such
people existed. They oughtn't to exist. The earth should be a lovely
place, its real estate occupied only by cultured and lovely people.
These aesthetic considerations reminded him with a shock that, just as
he had been an utter stranger to them, so he had been a stranger to his
father--his poor, old, widowed father. What did he really know about
him?--not one thing! And he had never tried to find out anything about
him,--about his friends, his thoughts, his manner of life,--content
merely to cash his checks, under the unconscious assumption that the man
who drew them ought to be equally content to be the father of such a
youth as himself. But those rusty relatives! They must have been his
father's! Certainly his mother's wouldn't have been like that,--and he
felt confident he took after his mother. Still, those relatives worried
him! Up at Harvard he had stood rather grandly on his name--"Payson
Clifford, Jr.,"--with no questions asked about the "Senior" or anybody
else. He now perceived that he was to be thrown out into the world of
fact where who and what his father had been might make a lot of
difference. Rather anxiously he hoped the old gentleman would turn out
to have been all right;--and would have left enough of an estate so that
he could still go on cashing checks upon the first day of every month!

It was one of the unwritten laws of the office of Tutt & Tutt that Mr.
Tutt was never to be bothered about the details