In Bayliss’ voice, even when he used his insinuating drawl and said disagreeable things, there was something a little plaintive; the expression of a deep-seated sense of injury.  He felt that he had always been misunderstood and underestimated.  Later after he went into business for himself, the young men of Frankfort had never urged him to take part in their pleasures.  He had not been asked to join the tennis club or the whist club.  He envied Claude his fine physique and his unreckoning, impulsive vitality, as if they had been given to his brother by unfair means and should rightly have been his.

Bayliss and his father were talking together before dinner when Claude came in and was so inconsiderate as to put up a window, though he knew his brother hated a draft.  In a moment Bayliss addressed him without looking at him: 

“I see your friends, the Erlichs, have bought out the Jenkinson company, in Lincoln; at least, they’ve given their notes.”

Claude had promised his mother to keep his temper today, “Yes, I saw it in the paper.  I hope they’ll succeed.”

“I doubt it.”  Bayliss shook his head with his wisest look.  “I understand they’ve put a mortgage on their home.  That old woman will find herself without a roof one of these days.”

“I don’t think so.  The boys have wanted to go into business together for a long while.  They are all intelligent and industrious; why shouldn’t they get on?” Claude flattered himself that he spoke in an easy, confidential way.

Bayliss screwed up his eyes.  “I expect they’re too fond of good living.  They’ll pay their interest, and spend whatever’s left entertaining their friends.  I didn’t see the young fellow’s name in the notice of incorporation, Julius, do they call him?”

“Julius is going abroad to study this fall.  He intends to be a professor.”

“What’s the matter with him?  Does he have poor health?”

At this moment the dinner bell sounded, Ralph ran down from his room where he had been dressing, and they all descended to the kitchen to greet the turkey.  The dinner progressed pleasantly.  Bayliss and his father talked politics, and Ralph told stories about his neighbours in Yucca county.  Bayliss was pleased that his mother had remembered he liked oyster stuffing, and he complimented her upon her mince pies.  When he saw her pour a second cup of coffee for herself and for Claude at the end of dinner, he said, in a gentle, grieved tone, “I’m sorry to see you taking two, Mother.”

Mrs. Wheeler looked at him over the coffee-pot with a droll, guilty smile.  “I don’t believe coffee hurts me a particle, Bayliss.”

“Of course it does; it’s a stimulant.”  What worse could it be, his tone implied!  When you said anything was a “stimulant,” you had sufficiently condemned it; there was no more noxious word.

Claude was in the upper hall, putting on his coat to go down to the barn and smoke a cigar, when Bayliss came out from the sitting-room and detained him by an indefinite remark.