Fulkerson asked, with as little joy in the grin he had on, “Didn’t he say anything to you before I came in?”

“Not a word.”

“Dogged if I know what to make of it,” sighed Fulkerson, “but I guess he’s been having a talk with Conrad that’s soured on him.  I reckon maybe he came back expecting to find that boy reconciled to the glory of this world, and Conrad’s showed himself just as set against it as ever.”

“It might have been that,” March admitted, pensively.  “I fancied something of the kind myself from words the old man let drop.”

Fulkerson made him explain, and then he said: 

“That’s it, then; and it’s all right.  Conrad ’ll come round in time; and all we’ve got to do is to have patience with the old man till he does.  I know he likes you.”  Fulkerson affirmed this only interrogatively, and looked so anxiously to March for corroboration that March laughed.

“He dissembled his love,” he said; but afterward, in describing to his wife his interview with Mr. Dryfoos, he was less amused with this fact.

When she saw that he was a little cast down by it, she began to encourage him.  “He’s just a common, ignorant man, and probably didn’t know how to express himself.  You may be perfectly sure that he’s delighted with the success of the magazine, and that he understands as well as you do that he owes it all to you.”

“Ah, I’m not so sure.  I don’t believe a man’s any better for having made money so easily and rapidly as Dryfoos has done, and I doubt if he’s any wiser.  I don’t know just the point he’s reached in his evolution from grub to beetle, but I do know that so far as it’s gone the process must have involved a bewildering change of ideals and criterions.  I guess he’s come to despise a great many things that he once respected, and that intellectual ability is among them—­what we call intellectual ability.  He must have undergone a moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generous instincts, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t have reached his mental make-up.  He has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned into suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity.  That’s the way I philosophize a man of Dryfoos’s experience, and I am not very proud when I realize that such a man and his experience are the ideal and ambition of most Americans.  I rather think they came pretty near being mine, once.”

“No, dear, they never did,” his wife protested.

“Well, they’re not likely to be in the future.  The Dryfoos feature of ‘Every Other Week’ is thoroughly distasteful to me.”

“Why, but he hasn’t really got anything to do with it, has he, beyond furnishing the money?”

“That’s the impression that Fulkerson has allowed us to get.  But the man that holds the purse holds the reins.  He may let us guide the horse, but when he likes he can drive.  If we don’t like his driving, then we can get down.”