yet started and poets who were about to begin, cluttered up Mr. Pett’s rooms on this fair June morning, while he, clutching his Sunday paper, wandered about, finding, like the dove in Genesis, no rest.  It was at such times that he was almost inclined to envy his wife’s first husband, a business friend of his named Elmer Ford, who had perished suddenly of an apoplectic seizure:  and the pity which he generally felt for the deceased tended to shift its focus.

Marriage had certainly complicated life for Mr. Pett, as it frequently does for the man who waits fifty years before trying it.  In addition to the geniuses, Mrs. Pett had brought with her to her new home her only son, Ogden, a fourteen-year-old boy of a singularly unloveable type.  Years of grown-up society and the absence of anything approaching discipline had given him a precocity on which the earnest efforts of a series of private tutors had expended themselves in vain.  They came, full of optimism and self-confidence, to retire after a brief interval, shattered by the boy’s stodgy resistance to education in any form or shape.  To Mr. Pett, never at his ease with boys, Ogden Ford was a constant irritant.  He disliked his stepson’s personality, and he more than suspected him of stealing his cigarettes.  It was an additional annoyance that he was fully aware of the impossibility of ever catching him at it.

Mr. Pett resumed his journey.  He had interrupted it for a moment to listen at the door of the morning-room, but, a remark in a high tenor voice about the essential Christianity of the poet Shelley filtering through the oak, he had moved on.

Silence from behind another door farther down the passage encouraged him to place his fingers on the handle, but a crashing chord from an unseen piano made him remove them swiftly.  He roamed on, and a few minutes later the process of elimination had brought him to what was technically his own private library—­a large, soothing room full of old books, of which his father had been a great collector.  Mr. Pett did not read old books himself, but he liked to be among them, and it is proof of his pessimism that he had not tried the library first.  To his depressed mind it had seemed hardly possible that there could be nobody there.

He stood outside the door, listening tensely.  He could hear nothing.  He went in, and for an instant experienced that ecstatic thrill which only comes to elderly gentlemen of solitary habit who in a house full of their juniors find themselves alone at last.  Then a voice spoke, shattering his dream of solitude.

“Hello, pop!”

Ogden Ford was sprawling in a deep chair in the shadows.

“Come in, pop, come in.  Lots of room.”

Mr. Pett stood in the doorway, regarding his step-son with a sombre eye.  He resented the boy’s tone of easy patronage, all the harder to endure with philosophic calm at the present moment from the fact that the latter was lounging in his favourite chair.  Even from an aesthetic point of view the sight of the bulging child offended him.  Ogden Ford was round and blobby and looked overfed.  He had the plethoric habit of one to whom wholesome exercise is a stranger and the sallow complexion of the confirmed candy-fiend.  Even now, a bare half hour after breakfast, his jaws were moving with a rhythmical, champing motion.