The last time he had looked carefully at her—­many, many years before—­he had thought her beautiful; he assumed thenceforth that she was still beautiful, and was therefore proud of her.  In like manner he had made up his mind favorably to his children.  As the bills grew heavier and heavier, from year to year, with the wife and two children assiduously expanding them, he paid none the less cheerfully.  “There is some satisfaction in paying up for them,” reflected he.  “At least a man can feel that he’s getting his money’s worth.”  And he contrasted his luck with the bad luck of so many men who had to “pay up” for “homely frumps, that look worse the more they spend.”

But Arthur was replying to Mrs. Whitney’s remark with a bitter “Nobody can do anything with father; he’s narrow and obstinate.  If you argue with him, he’s silent.  He cares for nothing but his business.”

Arthur did not hesitate to speak thus frankly to Mrs. Whitney.  She seemed a member of the family, like a sister of his mother or father who had lived with them always; also he accepted her at the valuation she and all her friends set upon her—­he, like herself and them, thought her generous and unselfish because she was lavish with sympathetic words and with alms—­the familiar means by which the heartless cheat themselves into a reputation for heart.  She always left the objects of her benevolence the poorer for her ministrations, though they did not realize it.  She adopted as the guiding principle of her life the cynical philosophy—­“Give people what they want, never what they need.”  By sympathizing effusively with those in trouble, she encouraged them in low-spiritedness; by lavishing alms, she weakened struggling poverty into pauperism.  But she took away and left behind enthusiasm for her own moral superiority and humanity.  Also she deceived herself and others with such fluid outpourings of fine phrases about “higher life” and “spiritual thinking” as so exasperated Hiram Ranger.

Now, instead of showing Arthur what her substratum of shrewd sense enabled her to see, she ministered soothingly unto his vanity.  His father was altogether wrong, tyrannical, cruel; he himself was altogether right, a victim of his father’s ignorance of the world.

“I decided not to submit,” said Arthur, as if the decision were one which had come to him the instant his father had shown the teeth and claws of tyranny, instead of being an impulse of just that moment, inspired by Mrs. Whitney’s encouragement to the weakest and worst in his nature.

“I shouldn’t be too hasty about that,” she cautioned.  “He is old and sick.  You ought to be more than considerate.  And, also, you should be careful not to make him do anything that would cut you out of your rights.”