And the mother, too, had altered, though, in her, the change had been a sweeter thing.  The making of a lady of this remote descendant of Alexander Hamilton’s blood had not been difficult.

Some strains of heredity can awaken from the submerged sleep of relapse as quickly and keenly as a woodsman throws off the mists of slumber.

Ham had never feared that his mother would reveal the taint of the parvenue when she faced the batteries of criticism which guard the outposts of the social world to which his own prominence gave the entree.  And Paul, with his gentle love of comfort and his thoughts that strayed into dreams and music, found the perfumed atmosphere of a drawing-room very congenial.  He breathed the incense of praise from women who were enraptured as his long fingers stole over the piano keys.  Had his road to artistic recognition lain along the broken trail of struggle, Paul would have fainted, undiscovered, by the wayside, but with every difficulty made smooth before his feet and every puddle carpeted by Hamilton’s cloth of gold, he found himself the lionized pet of inner circles and the favorite of the elect.

Of these things Hamilton Burton was thinking as he left his door for the car that awaited him.  From the start he had never deviated from his well-laid course of determination.  Power was his goal and by power he meant no mean modicum, but limitless strength.  He had picked finance as his field of endeavor because in this day the scepter that sways affairs must be the scepter of gold.  But Hamilton Burton knew that he was only starting and his plans ran to the future.  As he looked ahead he never forgot that the fighter must be well conditioned.  With the discipline of the boxer in training, he regulated his habits of personal life and held his splendid nerves steady and above par.  No man had ever seen the dimming cloud of dissipation in his eye nor any gossip-monger whispered of unwise indulgence.  He was spoken of as fastidiously clean of life, and yet it is doubtful whether any shadow of self-illusion found harbor in his own mind.  In morals as a code inspired of conscience he had no interest; in rigid self-restraint from all that might impair the highest efficiency of nerve and brain he was as unyielding as a Trappist.  To the mandate of his single deity, Ambition, he clove with unswerving sternness.  His lavish generosity to his family was a strong and clannish passion—­yet even that was a sort of greater selfishness and all the world outside he held in ruthless disregard—­a realm to conquer.  That one may conquer, many must fall—­and to conquer was his one resolve.

Even now, awaited by several men who were not accustomed to cooling their heels in anterooms, he halted at the curb, when he saw another automobile draw up and recognized his brother Paul.

The younger Burton was not so greatly changed.  On his cameo features still lingered the delicate hall-mark of the over-sensitive and about his lips played the petulant expression of one who could not cope with the material.  His eyes were still pools of brooding darkness, and as he glanced up and met his brother’s smile his expression of pleasure was boyish and spontaneous.