"You don't say!" replied the junior Tutt, glancing up from the letter he was writing. "Which one,—Payson, Senior, or Payson, Junior?"
"Payson, Senior," answered Mr. Tutt as he snipped off the end of a stogy with the pair of nail scissors which he always carried in his vest pocket.
"In that case, it's too bad," remarked 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 to confess that there wasn't much between them. His son expressed the same thought by regretting that his father "did not speak his language."
So, in the winter vacation when Payson, Sr., fagged from his long day at the office sought the "Frolics" or the "Folies," Payson, Jr., might be seen at a concert for the harpsichord and viola, or at an evening of Palestrina or the Earlier Gregorian Chants. Had he been less supercilious about it this story would never have been written—and doubtless no great loss at that. But it is the prerogative of youth to be arrogantly merciless in its judgment of the old. Its bright lexicon has no verdict "with mitigating circumstances." Youth is just when it is right; it is cruel when it is wrong; and it is inexorable in any case. If we are ever to be tried for our crimes let us have juries of white whiskered old boys who like tobacco, crab flakes, light wines and musical comedy.