For the story of his family, from Roger’s point of view at least, was a long uneven narrative, with prolonged periods of peace and again with events piling one on the other.  And now there came one of those peaceful times, and Roger liked the quiet.  The old routine was re-established—­his dinner, his paper, his cigar and then his book for the evening, some good old-fashioned novel or some pleasant book of travel which he and Judith had read aloud when they were planning out their lives.  They had meant to go abroad so often when the children had grown up.  And he liked to read about it still.  Life was so quiet over the sea, things were so old and mellow there.  He resumed, too, his horseback rides, and on the way home he would stop in for a visit with Edith and her baby.  The wee boy grew funnier every day, with his sudden kicks and sneezes, his waving fists and mighty yawns.  And Roger felt drawn to his daughter here, for in these grateful seasons of rest that followed the birth of each of her children, Edith loved to lie very still and make new plans for her small brood.

Only once she spoke of Laura, and then it was to suggest to him that he gather together all the bills his daughter had doubtless left behind.

“If you don’t settle them,” Edith said, “they’ll go to her husband.  And you wouldn’t like that, would you?”

Roger said he would see to it, and one evening after dinner he started in on Laura’s bills.  It was rather an appalling time.  He looked into his bank account and found that Laura’s wedding would take about all his surplus.  But this did not dismay him much, for money matters never did.  It simply meant more work in the office.

The next day he rose early and was in his office by nine o’clock.  He had not been so prompt in months, and many of his employees came in late that morning.  But nobody seemed very much perturbed, for Roger was an easy employer.  Still, he sternly told himself, he had been letting things get altogether too slack.  He had been neglecting his business again.  The work had become so cut and dried, there was nothing creative left to do.  It had not been so in years gone by.  Those years had fairly bristled with ideas and hopes and schemes.  But even those old memories were no longer here to hearten him.  They had all been swept away when Bruce had made him move out of his office in a dark creaky edifice down close under Brooklyn Bridge, and come up to this new building, this steel-ribbed caravansary for all kinds of business ventures, this place of varnished woodwork, floods of daylight, concrete floors, this building fireproof throughout.  That expressed it exactly, Roger thought.  Nothing could take fire here, not even a man’s imagination, even though he did not feel old.  Now and then in the elevator, as some youngster with eager eyes pushed nervously against him, Roger would frown and wonder, “What are you so excited about?”