“It is,” Mr. Raycie concluded, “in order to put you on a footing of equality with the best collectors that I have placed such a large sum at your disposal. I reckon that for ten thousand dollars you can travel for two years in the very best style; and I mean to place another five thousand to your credit”—he paused, and let the syllables drop slowly into his son’s brain: “five thousand dollars for the purchase of works of art, which eventually—remember—will be yours; and will be handed on, I trust, to your sons’ sons as long as the name of Raycie survives”—a length of time, Mr. Raycie’s tone seemed to imply, hardly to be measured in periods less extensive than those of the Egyptian dynasties.
Lewis heard him with a whirling brain. Five thousand dollars! The sum seemed so enormous, even in dollars, and so incalculably larger when translated into any continental currency, that he wondered why his father, in advance, had given up all hope of a Raphael.... “If I travel economically,” he said to himself, “and deny myself unnecessary luxuries, I may yet be able to surprise him by bringing one back. And my mother—how magnanimous, how splendid! Now I see why she has consented to all the little economies that sometimes seemed so paltry and so humiliating....”
The young man’s eyes filled with tears, but he was still silent, though he longed as never before to express his gratitude and admiration to his father. He had entered the study expecting a parting sermon on the subject of thrift, coupled with the prospective announcement of a “suitable establishment” (he could even guess the particular Huzzard girl his father had in view); and instead he had been told to spend his princely allowance in a princely manner, and to return home with a gallery of masterpieces. “At least,” he murmured to himself, “it shall contain a Correggio.”
“Well, sir?” Mr. Raycie boomed.
“Oh, sir—” his son cried, and flung himself on the vast slope of the parental waistcoat.
Amid all these accumulated joys there murmured deep down in him the thought that nothing had been said or done to interfere with his secret plans about Treeshy. It seemed almost as if his father had tacitly accepted the idea of their unmentioned engagement; and Lewis felt half guilty at not confessing to it then and there. But the gods are formidable even when they unbend; never more so, perhaps, than at such moments....