“Judge,” said Mr. Watling, sitting down again, “do you recall that time we all went up to Mr. Paret’s house and tried to induce him to run for mayor?  That was before you went on the lower bench.”

The judge nodded gloomily, caressing his watch chain, and suddenly rose to go.

“That will be all right, then?” Mr. Watling inquired cryptically, with a smile.  The other made a barely perceptible inclination of the head and departed.  Mr. Watling looked at me.  “He’s one of the best men we have on the bench to-day,” he added.  There was a trace of apology in his tone.

He talked a while of my father, to whom, so he said, he had looked up ever since he had been admitted to the bar.

“It would be a pleasure to me, Hugh, as well as a matter of pride,” he said cordially, but with dignity, “to have Matthew Paret’s son in my office.  I suppose you will be wishing to take your mother somewhere this summer, but if you care to come here in the autumn, you will be welcome.  You will begin, of course, as other young men begin,—­as I began.  But I am a believer in blood, and I’ll be glad to have you.  Mr. Fowndes and Mr. Ripon feel the same way.”  He escorted me to the door himself.

Everywhere I went during that brief visit home I was struck by change, by the crumbling and decay of institutions that once had held me in thrall, by the superimposition of a new order that as yet had assumed no definite character.  Some of the old landmarks had disappeared; there were new and aggressive office buildings, new and aggressive residences, new and aggressive citizens who lived in them, and of whom my mother spoke with gentle deprecation.  Even Claremore, that paradise of my childhood, had grown shrivelled and shabby, even tawdry, I thought, when we went out there one Sunday afternoon; all that once represented the magic word “country” had vanished.  The old flat piano, made in Philadelphia ages ago, the horsehair chairs and sofa had been replaced by a nondescript furniture of the sort displayed behind plate-glass windows of the city’s stores:  rocking-chairs on stands, upholstered in clashing colours, their coiled springs only half hidden by tassels, and “ornamental” electric fixtures, instead of the polished coal-oil lamps.  Cousin Jenny had grown white, Willie was a staid bachelor, Helen an old maid, while Mary had married a tall, anaemic young man with glasses, Walter Kinley, whom Cousin Robert had taken into the store.  As I contemplated the Brecks odd questions suggested themselves:  did honesty and warm-heartedness necessarily accompany a lack of artistic taste? and was virtue its own reward, after all?  They drew my mother into the house, took off her wraps, set her down in the most comfortable rocker, and insisted on making her a cup of tea.

I was touched.  I loved them still, and yet I was conscious of reservations concerning them.  They, too, seemed a little on the defensive with me, and once in a while Mary was caustic in her remarks.