To Harrington Surtaine, life had been a game with easy rules.  Certain things one must not do.  Decent people didn’t do them.  That’s all there was to that.  In matters of morals and conduct, he was guided by a natural temperance and an innate sense of responsibility to himself.  Difficult questions had not come up in his life.  Consequently he had not found the exercise of judgment troublesome.  His tendency, as regarded his own affairs, was to a definite promptness of decision, and there was an end of the matter.  Others he seldom felt called upon to judge, but if the instance were ineluctable, he was prone to an amiable generosity.  Ease of living does not breed in the mind a strongly defined philosophy.  All that young Mr. Surtaine required of his fellow beings was that they should behave themselves with a due and respectable regard to the rights of all in general and of himself in particular—­and he would do the same by them.  Rather a pallid attenuation of the Golden Rule; but he had thus far found it sufficient to his existence.

Into this peaceful world-scheme intruded, now, a disorganizing factor.  He had brought it home with him from his visit to the “shop.”  An undefined but pervasive distaste for the vast, bustling, profitable Certina business formed the nucleus of it.  As he thought it over that night, amidst the heavily ornate elegance of the great bedroom, which, with its dressing-room and bath, his father had set aside for his use in the Surtaine mansion, he felt in the whole scheme of the thing a vague offense.  The air which he had breathed in those spacious halls of trade had left a faintly malodorous reminiscence in his nostrils.

One feature of his visit returned insistently to his mind:  the contrast between the semi-contemptuous carelessness exhibited by his father toward the processes of compounding the cure and the minute and insistent attention given to the methods of expounding it.  Was the advertising really of so much more import than the medicine itself?  If so, wasn’t the whole affair a matter of selling shadow rather than substance?

But it is not in human nature to view with too stern a scrutiny a business which furnishes one’s easeful self with all the requisites of luxury, and that by processes of almost magic simplicity.  Hal reflected that all big businesses doubtless had their discomforting phases.  He had once heard a lecturing philosopher express a doubt as to whether it were possible to defend, ethically, that prevalent modern phenomenon, the millionaire, in any of his manifestations.  By the counsel of perfection this might well be true.  But who was he to judge his father by such rigorous standards?  Of the medical aspect of the question he could form no clear judgment.  To him the patent medicine trade was simply a part of the world’s business, like railroading, banking, or any other form of merchandising.  His own precocious commercial experience, when, as a boy, he had played his little part in the barter and trade, had blinded him on that side.  Nevertheless, his mind was not impregnably fortified.  Old Lame-Boy, bearer of dollars to the bank, loomed up, a disturbing figure.