“As a matter of fact,” Wilsey began again even more coldly, “I should have signed—­”

“Oh, you think so now.  A hundred years from now you’d sign a petition for the eight-hour law.”

“Never!” said Wilsey, raising his hand.  “I should never put my name to a document—­” He stopped at another roar from his friend, and never took the sentence up again, but indicated with a gesture that only legal minds were worth arguing with on points of this sort.

When he had gone, Lanley dipped the spoon in his oyster stew with not a little pleasure.  Nothing, apparently, could have raised his spirits more than the knowledge that old Josiah Wilsey had not signed the Declaration.  He actually chuckled a little.  “So like Wilsey himself,” he thought.  “No moral courage; calls it conservatism.”  Then his joy abated.  Just so, he thought, must he himself appear to Mrs. Wayne.  Yet his self-respect insisted that his case was different.  Loyalty had been responsible not for his conservatism, but for the pig-headedness with which he had acted upon it.  He would have asked nothing better than to profess himself open-minded to Mrs. Wayne’s views, only he could not desert Adelaide in the moment of her struggle for beliefs in which he himself had brought her up.  And now she had deserted him.  He alone was left to flaunt a banner the motto of which he didn’t wholly believe, while Adelaide, at a word from Vincent, had gone over to the other side.  And no one knew what his loyalty had cost him.  Long ago, in his first year at college, he had flunked the examination of the professor whom he reverenced above all others.  No one had cared, no one had long remembered, except Lanley himself, and he had remembered because some one had told him what the professor said on reading his paper.  It was nothing but, “I had supposed Lanley was intelligent.”  Never again had he had that professor’s attention for a single instant.  This, it seemed to him, was about to happen to him again, now when it was too late in his life to do anything but despair.

He called the waiter, paid his bill and tip,—­he was an extremely liberal tipper; “it’s expected of us,” he used to say, meaning that it was expected of people like the New York Lanleys,—­and went away.

In old times he had been an inventor of many clever tricks for getting up-town by unpopular elevated trains and horse-cars that avoided the crowd, but the subway was a great leveler, and he knew no magic except to take a local in rush hours.  At three o’clock, however, even this was not necessary.  He took an express, and got off at the Grand Central, turned up Park Avenue, and then east.  He had just found out that he was going to visit Mrs. Wayne.

He read the names in the vestibule, never doubting that Dr. Parret was a masculine practitioner, and hesitated at the name of Wayne.  He thought he ought to ring the bell, but he wanted to go straight up.  Some one had left the front door unlatched.  He pushed it open and began the steep ascent.