hung a large black and white engraving of Abraham
Lincoln, with one hand resting on the Proclamation of Emancipation,
flanked by smaller portraits of Henry Ward Beecher and the author of the
McKinley tariff. Opposite was an old-time family group done in crayons,
representing Mr. and Mrs. Crocker standing side by side, with Jack in
long trousers and Tom in short, while on the shining desk amid the
papers was a daguerrotype mounted in a worn leather frame, of the wife
who had been dead fifteen years.

Bojo selected a cigar from the visitors box and strode up and down,
rehearsing in his mind the arguments he would bring to bear against the
expected ultimatum. From the window the lower bay expanded below him
with its steam insects crawling across the blue-gray surface, its
wharf-crowded shores, beyond the ledges on ledges of factories trailing
cotton streamers against the brittle sky. Everywhere the empire of
industry extended its stone barracks without loveliness or pomp,
smoke-grimed, implacable prisons, where multitudes herded under
artificial light that humanity might live in terms of millions.

As he looked, he seemed already to have surrendered his individuality,
swallowed up in the army of labor, and the revolt arose in him anew.
What was the use of money if it could not bring a wider horizon and
greater opportunities? And a sort of dull anger moved in him against the
parental ambition which limited him to unnecessary drudgery.

Of all the persons he had met the greatest stranger to him was his
father. Since his mother's death, when he was but eight years of age,
his life had been spent in boarding school and college, in summer camps
or on visits to chums. Their relations had been formal. At the beginning
and end of each summer he had come down the long avenue of desks, past
the glass doors into the private office, to report, to receive money,
and to be sped with a few appropriate words of advice. Several times
during the year his father would appear on a short warning, stay a few
hours, and hurry off. On such occasions Tom had always felt that he was
being surveyed and estimated as a lumberman watches the growth of a
young forest.

His father was always in a hurry, always in good health, matter of fact,
and generous. That his business had prospered and extended he knew,
though to what extent his father's activities had multiplied he still
was ignorant. Conversation between them had always been difficult in
those