PART VII
I
Albert recovered in due season—a little more rapidly, it may be, than if he had stayed with his father, but not more completely. His education progressed, entering another phase, and still with the unauthorized coöperation of his mother. During his stay with her she had really wrought no great havoc in his wardrobe, whatever she may have accomplished on a previous occasion. In fact, Albert had reached the point where he dressed in a manlier fashion—a fashion fortunately standardized beyond a mother's whims. In his turn, as it had been with his brothers by marriage, it was now the real preparatory school, with college looming ahead.
By this time Raymond had completely made his belated adieux to æsthetic concerns and had begun to concentrate on practical matters—on his own. They needed his attention, even if he had not the right quality of attention to give. I had my doubts, and they did not grow less as time went on. Raymond was now within hail of fifty, and he added to his long list of earlier mistakes a new mistake peculiar to his years and to his training—or his lack of it.
Briefly, he assumed that age in itself brought knowledge, and that young men in their twenties—even their late twenties—were but boys. The disadvantage of holding this view became apparent when he began to do business with them. He depended too much on his own vague fund of experience, and did not realize how dangerous it might be to encounter keen specialists—however young—in their own field. He was now engaged in a general recasting of his affairs, and they came to him in numbers—bright, boyish, young fellows, he called them. He tended to patronize them, and he began to deal with them rather informally and much too confidently.
The family bank, after languishing along for a liberal time under its receiver, had been wound up, and the stockholders, among whom he was a large one but far from the largest, accepted the results and turned wry faces to new prospects elsewhere. The family holdings of real-estate, on the edge of the central district rather than in it, did not share the general and almost automatic advance in values, and an uncertain, slow-moving scheme for a general public improvement—one that continually promised to eventuate yet continually held off—had kept one of his warehouses vacant for years: its only income was contributed by an advertising company, which utilized part of its front as a bulletin-board. Rents in this quarter kept down, though taxes—more through rising rates than increased valuations—went up. And those two big old houses! Raymond still lived, too expensively in one, and paid interest on a cumbering old mortgage. The other—old Jehiel's—was rented, at no great advantage, to a kind of correspondence school which conducted dubious courses and was precarious pay.
In such circumstances Raymond began to lend an ear to offers of "real-estate trades" and to suggestions for reinvestments. But real-estate, in which almost everybody had once dabbled (with advantage assumed and usually realized), had now become a game for experts. Profits for the few: disaster—or at least disillusionment—for the many. Raymond thought he could "exchange" to advantage, and the bright young men (who knew what they were about much better than he did) flocked to help him. Well, one man in a hundred exchanges with profit; the ninety-and-nine, the further they go the more they lose—onions peeled coat by coat. Thus Raymond, until I heard of some of his operations and tried to stop them. One frank-faced, impudent young chap, who thought he was secure in a contract, I had to frighten off; but others had preceded him.
Investments were offered him too: schemes in town, and schemes—bolder and more numerous—out of town. Some of these had the support of McComas and his "crowd," and turned out advantageously enough, for those on the "inside"—to continue the jargon of the day and its interests; but Raymond sensitively, even fastidiously, stepped away from these, and trusted himself, rather, to financial free lances who often were not only without principle, but also without definite foothold.