d. What was more commendable than a
mother's interest in her children's pleasures? Moreover, it was his
wife's way of following things up, of never letting die grass grow
under her feet, that had helped to push him along in the world. She
was more ambitious than he,--that had been good for him. He was
naturally indolent, and Julia's childlike desire to possess material
objects, to buy what other people were buying, had been the spur
that made him go after business. It had, moreover, made his house
the attractive place he believed it to be.

"Suppose," his wife sometimes said to him when the bills came in
from Celeste or Mme. Blanche, "suppose you had homely daughters; how
would you like that?"

He wouldn't have liked it. When he went anywhere with his three
ladies, Wanning always felt very well done by. He had no complaint
to make about them, or about anything. That was why it seemed so
unreasonable--He felt along his back incredulously with his hand.
Harold, of course, was a trial; but among all his business friends,
he knew scarcely one who had a promising boy.

The house was so still that Wanning could hear a faint, metallic
tinkle from the butler's pantry. Old Sam was washing up the silver,
which he put away himself every night.

Wanning rose and walked aimlessly down the hall and out through the
dining-room.

"Any Apollinaris on ice, Sam? I'm not feeling very well tonight."

The old colored man dried his hands.

"Yessah, Mistah Wanning. Have a little rye with it, sah?"

"No, thank you, Sam. That's one of the things I can't do any more.
I've been to see a big doctor in the city, and he tells me there's
something seriously wrong with me. My kidneys have sort of gone back
on me."

It was a satisfaction to Wanning to name the organ that had betrayed
him, while all the rest of him was so sound.

Sam was immediately interested. He shook his grizzled head and
looked full of wisdom.

"Don't seem like a gen'leman of such a temperate life ought to have
anything wrong thar, sah."

"No, it doesn't, does it?"

Wanning leaned against the china closet and talked to Sam for nearly
half an hour. The specialist who condemned him hadn't seemed half so
much interested. There was not a detail about the examination and
the laboratory tests in which Sam did not show the deepest concern.
He kept asking Wanning if he could remember "straining himself" when
he was a young man.

"I've knowed a strain like that to sleep in