"If you would only consult me!" more than once I had occasion to remonstrate. "Who are these people? What organization have they got—what responsibility?"
But though he would dicker with strangers, who took hours of his time with their specious palaverings, he shrank more and more from his own tenants and his own agents. One rather important lease had to be renewed over his head—or behind his back. Still, I do not know that, on this particular occasion, his interests greatly suffered.
Thus Raymond began to approach a permanent impairment of his affairs at an age when recuperation for a man of his deficiencies was as good as out of the question. Further on still he began to suspect—even to realize—that he was unfitted to cope with adults. In his later fifties he began to pat children on their heads in parks and to rub the noses of horses in the streets. With the younger creatures of the human race and with the gentler orders of the brute creation he felt he could trust himself, and still escape disaster. If he found little girls sticking rows of fallen catalpa-blossoms on the spikes of iron fences, he would stop and praise their powers of design. He became susceptible to tiny boys in brown sweaters or infinitesimal blue overalls, and he seldom passed without a touch of sympathy the mild creatures that helped deliver the laundry-bundles or the milk. Especially if they were white: he was always sorry, he said, for white coats in a dirty town.
But such matters of advancing age are for the future.
II
As regards the affairs of McComas, I naturally had a lesser knowledge. They were more numerous and more complicated; nor was I close to them. I can only say that they went on prosperously, and continued to go on prosperously: their success justified his concentration on them.
As regards his home and his domestic affairs, I can have more to say. My wife and I called once or twice at their new house; with a daughter of twenty-odd, there was no reason why we should not cultivate that particular suburb, and every reason why we should.
Johnny's two sons were at home, briefly, as seniors who were soon to graduate. They were tall, hearty lads, with some of their father's high coloring. One of them was to be injured on the ball-field in his last term, and to die at home a month later. The other, recovering some of the individuality which a twin sometimes finds it none too easy to assert, was to marry before he had been out of college six weeks—marry young, like his father before him. The girl, young Althea, rather resembling her mother,—her own mother,—was beginning to think less of large hair-bows and more of longer dresses. Her father was quite wrapped up in her and her stepmother seemed to take to her kindly.