“Yes. You see, partly it’s because he himself has worked all his life like three ordinary men and, conceding the system, has made his fortune honestly. It isn’t merely that he wants to hold what he’s acquired. It’s rather that unconsciously he feels any attack on the system as an attack on his own integrity.” Stacey paused, with a frown. “It’s something even more than that,” he continued slowly. “If a man has all his life played the game vigorously and loyally according to the rules, he doesn’t at sixty-one want to be told that the rules were all wrong. That would be knocking everything from under him. Father has to believe that what is is right, or where would he be? Right and wrong mean a great deal to him—he’s old-fashioned in that. And then, I must say, it is a slovenly world at present for a man with clean-cut ideas to look out on. A bedraggled tattered place, with cocky young chaps sitting in literary offices and blithely announcing every week that something else is wrong with things in general. Not that there isn’t enough that’s wrong, and the more truth that’s told about it, the better; but a lot of the complaining is either whining or just rotten cleverness. Fancy being clever about a cyclone—or the Judgment Day!” He paused and lit a cigarette. “Father’s an out-and-out idealist,” Stacey concluded. “He’s got to believe passionately in something, and he’s too old to believe in something new. Besides, nothing new is clearly presented to one.”
“Yes,” Catherine said, “that is very clear and fair, Stacey.” But the look that her dark eyes gave him was full of perplexity.
“Oh,” he observed lightly, “I know! You think I’m a reformed character. Not a bit of it! ‘Nothing of me that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.’ ” He laughed ironically.
And Catherine was much too shy, as he knew she would be, to pursue the subject.
When later he went upstairs he stood for a long time before the open window of his study. “It can’t be done,” he said to himself at last. “You can’t look at the world as a whole and stay sane. Because there isn’t any such world. That’s a nightmare of ogre words. Bolshevism, labor problem, greed, reaction,—they’re merely words. All that there truly is is a lot of puny little men like myself, dreaming dreams—mostly bad ones.”
CHAPTER XX
At nine the next morning Stacey drove down town with his father. Perhaps no real intimacy was possible between them, since they had hardly a thought or a belief in common, but they were, simply through a heightened mutual friendliness, closer together than they had been for six years. Stacey went up to his father’s pleasant office and watched Mr. Carroll sit down in his swivel-chair, light a cigar, and open his letters with a paper-knife.
Stacey smiled. “I’ve sometimes wondered, sir,” he said, “why at sixty or thereabouts you—”
“Here! Here! Stop it!” Mr. Carroll interrupted ruefully.
“Well, anyway I’ve wondered why you didn’t retire and just amuse yourself, since you’ve certainly earned a rest. But—”