“That’s it,” continued Adelaide.  “He’s a poor creature, dumb and ignorant.  He knows only one thing—­snobbishness.  Yet every one of us was in terror of his opinion.  No doubt kings feel the same way about the people around them.  Always what’s expected of us—­and by whom?  Why, by people who have little sense and less knowledge.  They run the world, don’t they?”

“As Dory Hargrave says,” said her brother, “the only scheme for making things better that’s worth talking about is raising the standards of the masses because their standards are ours.  We’ll be fools and unjust as long as they’ll let us.  And they’ll let us as long as they’re ignorant.”

By inheritance Arthur and Adelaide had excellent minds, shrewd and with that cast of humor which makes for justice of judgment by mocking at the solemn frauds of interest and prejudice.  But, as is often the case with the children of the rich and the well-to-do, there had been no necessity for either to use intellect; their parents and hirelings of various degrees, paid with their father’s generously given money, had done their thinking for them.  The whole of animate creation is as lazy as it dares be, and man is no exception.  Thus, the Ranger children, like all other normal children of luxury, rarely made what would have been, for their fallow minds, the arduous exertion of real thinking.  When their minds were not on pastimes or personalities they were either rattling round in their heads or exchanging the ideas, real and reputed, that happened to be drifting about, at the moment, in their “set.”  Those ideas they and their friends received, and stored up or passed on with never a thought as to whether they were true or false, much as they used coins or notes they took in and paid out.  Arthur and Adelaide soon wearied of their groping about in the mystery of human society—­how little direct interest it had for them then!  They drove on; the vision which had stimulated them to think vanished; they took up again those personalities about friends, acquaintances and social life that are to thinking somewhat as massage is to exercise—­all the motions of real activity, but none of its spirit.  They stopped for two calls and tea on the fashionable Bluffs.

When they reached home, content with tandem, drive, themselves, their friends, and life in general, they found Hiram Ranger returned from work, though it was only half-past five, and stretched on the sofa in the sitting room, with his eyes shut.  At this unprecedented spectacle of inactivity they looked at each other in vague alarm; they were stealing away, when he called:  “I’m not asleep.”

His expression made Adelaide impulsively kneel beside him and gaze anxiously into his face.  He smiled, roused himself to a sitting posture, well concealing the effort the exertion cost him.

“Your father’s getting old,” he said, hiding his tragedy of aching body and aching heart and impending doom in a hypocrisy of cheerfulness that would have passed muster even had he not been above suspicion.  “I’m not up to the mark of the last generation.  Your grandfather was fifty when I was born, and he didn’t die till I was fifty.”