Now they were grown up, and they were riding; and it was natural that the fire of the heart should have calmed.  He was proud of the pair, very proud.  Pete (no, he mustn’t call him by that name.  Ena didn’t like it, said it sounded common) Peter—­or Petro, if he preferred—­was a gentleman and made a good show for every dollar that had been spent on him.  Put him with an Astor or a Livingston and you couldn’t tell the difference!

Once, a long time ago, old Peter had dreamed of a young Peter succeeding him in the business; but Ena had made him see what a foolish dream that was—­foolish and inconsistent, too—­because, what was the good of slaving to satisfy your ambition, and then, when you reached the goal, instead of profiting by what you’d got, ordering your heir down to the level you’d worked to leave behind?

Peter senior had entirely come round to Ena’s view, and instead of regretting that Peter junior hadn’t in him the making of a hard-boiled man of business who’ll do anything to succeed, father stopped Peter abruptly whenever he showed an inconvenient sign of interest in the Hands and what went on under the glitter of their rings.  Nor was Peter’s interest of the right kind.  It was not what Peter senior called practical.

Ena, now!  There was a girl to be proud of.  Father was so proud that pride of his splendid daughter had frozen out or covered with ashes the glow which used to fill his heart at the thought of her.  But pride was the right thing!  That was what he had worked for:  to make of his children a man and woman to be proud of when the top stone was on his pile.

Ena was more than a lady.  She was an orchid, a princess.  She ruled father with her little finger—­a beautifully manicured, rose-and-white finger, such as he had hardly seen when he was young.  There was so much of himself in Ena that Peter yielded to her mandates as to the inarticulate cry of his own soul translated into words.  The princess in whose veins his blood ran must understand what he ought to want better than he himself could understand.

She said:  What was the fun of having money if you couldn’t know all the best people everywhere, and be of them as well as merely among them?  She began saying this even before she came home “for good” from school.  It was a school for millionaires’ daughters, and the daughters of other millionaires had showed her the difference between her father and theirs, oil magnates and steel and railway magnates, and magnates who magnated on their ancestors’ fortunes made in land or skins of animals.

Nothing really worth having—­nothing really worth father’s years of hard work—­could come to them as a family until Peter Rolls ceased to identify himself personally with the Hands, Ena had pleaded, and at last the head of the establishment engaged an official “understudy” to represent him every day in the gorgeously furnished office which had seemed to old Peter what the body is to the soul.