Whitney grunted, the frown of his brows and the smile on his sardonic mouth contradicting each other.  He could not but be pleased by the shrewdness of his son’s criticism of his own half-sincere, half-hypocritical tribute to virtues that were on the wane; but at the same time he did not like such frank expression of cynical truth from a son of his.  Also, he at the bottom still had some of the squeamishness that was born into him and trained into him in early youth; he did not like to be forced squarely to face the fact that real business had been relegated to the less able or less honest, while the big rewards of riches and respect were for the sly and stealthy.  Enforcing what Ross had said, there came into his mind the reflection that he himself had just bribed through the Legislature, for a comparatively trifling sum, a law that would swell his fortune and income within the next five years more than would a lifetime of devotion to business.

He would have been irritated far more deeply had he known that Arthur was as well aware of the change from the old order as was Ross, and that deliberately and on principle he was refusing to adapt himself to the new order, the new conditions of “success.”  When Arthur’s manliness first asserted itself, there was perhaps as much of vanity as of pride in his acceptance of the consequences of Hiram’s will.  But to an intelligent man any environment, except one of inaction or futile action, soon becomes interesting; the coming of Madelene was all that was needed to raise his interest to enthusiasm.  He soon understood his fellow-workers as few of them understood themselves.  Every human group, of whatever size or kind, is apt to think its characteristics peculiar to itself, when in fact they are as universal as human nature, and the modifications due to the group’s environment are insignificant matters of mere surface.  Nationality, trade, class no more affect the oneness of mankind than do the ocean’s surface variations of color or weather affect its unchangeable chemistry.  Waugh, who had risen from the ranks, Howells, who had begun as shipping clerk, despised those above whom they had risen, regarded as the peculiar weaknesses of the working classes such universal failings as prejudice, short-sightedness, and shirking.  They lost no opportunity to show their lack of sympathy with the class from which they had sprung and to which they still belonged in reality, their devotion to the class plutocratic to which they aspired.  Arthur, in losing the narrowness of the class from which he had been ejected, lost all class narrowness.  The graduates from the top have the best chance to graduate into the wide, wide world of human brotherhood.  By an artificial process—­by compulsion, vanity, reason, love—­he became what Madelene was by nature.  She was one of those rare human beings born with a just and clear sense of proportion.  It was thus impossible for her to exaggerate into importance the trivial differences of mental stature.  She saw that they were no greater than the differences of men’s physical stature, if men be compared with mountains or any other just measure of the vast scale on which the universe is constructed.  And so it came naturally to her to appreciate that the vital differences among men are matters of character and usefulness, just as among things they are matters of beauty and use.