“How I envy you your clear intelligent head!” said she, somewhat scornfully.  “You lay out for yourself some plan or another in life, and then your object is forthwith accomplished.  You quietly follow your plans, and in the same way you expect that those to whom you give your advice, will follow it without wavering.  You are just like father.  You really are too precise.”

“I regard that as the greatest compliment I have ever received,” answered Worse, smiling.

“But father was in many respects an old-fashioned and somewhat prejudiced man.  It was just these very modern ideas that you find so attractive, which were to him strange or even positively distasteful.”  She made this remark more for the purpose of drawing out Worse than because she wished to disparage her father.

“Consul Garman,” said Worse, rising from his chair, “was a dissatisfied man.  His whole life was an ill-concealed struggle between the old and the new.  He placed extraordinary confidence in me, and I found in him ideas, which no one would have expected to meet with in such a precise and old-fashioned man of business.  But to reconcile the two incongruous currents was beyond his power; the immature and impetuous want of exactitude of modern times was repugnant to his nature; and when his great sense of justice forced him to recognize certain fundamental truths, it was still always a source of annoyance to him to be obliged to do so.  It appears to me that he sought a counteracting influence to all this, in his boundless admiration for old Consul Garman.”

“But was not my grandfather a remarkable man?  Don’t you think so?” asked Rachel, with interest.

“I will tell you my opinion, Miss Garman.  He was a man who lived in a time to which he was suited, and in which, on the whole, existence was far more easy.”

“You mean to say, then, that existence was easier in those times than in the present?”

“Yes, I am sure of it,” continued Worse, pacing hurriedly up and down the room, as was his custom when he was excited.  “Do you not see how existence becomes more difficult with each year as it passes?  New discoveries and experiences are springing up every hour, and doubts and inquiry are burrowing under, and undermining the whole fabric.  Revered and well-grounded truths are falling to the ground, and those who are too timid to advance with the times, are gathering confusedly about the rotten framework, supporting, preserving, and terrified, denouncing youth, and predicting the destruction of society.  Your grandfather stood on the very summit of the cultivation of his day, living as he did in a state of society which was peaceful and conscious of its security, with aristocratic intelligence above and aristocratic ignorance below.  Your father, on the other hand, had grown to manhood when the movement reached us, and he had already a fixed understanding as to his own line in life, when the new ideas came streaming in upon him.