“I’ll tell you a secret, mother.  I’m going to be taken into the firm.”

“Oh, my dear, I’m so glad!” she exclaimed.  “I often think, if only your father were alive, how happy he would be, and how proud of you.  I wish he could know.  Perhaps he does know.”

Theodore Watling had once said to me that the man who can best keep his own counsel is the best counsel for other men to keep.  I did not go about boasting of the part I had played in originating the now famous Bill No. 709, the passage of which had brought about the capitulation of the Ribblevale Steel Company to our clients.  But Ralph Hambleton knew of it, of course.

“That was a pretty good thing you pulled off, Hughie,” he said.  “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

It was rank patronage, of course, yet I was secretly pleased.  As the years went on I was thrown more and more with him, though in boyhood there had been between us no bond of sympathy.  About this time he was beginning to increase very considerably the Hambleton fortune, and a little later I became counsel for the Crescent Gas and Electric Company, in which he had shrewdly gained a controlling interest.  Even toward the colossal game of modern finance his attitude was characteristically that of the dilettante, of the amateur; he played it, as it were, contemptuously, even as he had played poker at Harvard, with a cynical audacity that had a peculiarly disturbing effect upon his companions.  He bluffed, he raised the limit in spite of protests, and when he lost one always had the feeling that he would ultimately get his money back twice over.  At the conferences in the Boyne Club, which he often attended, his manner toward Mr. Dickinson and Mr. Scherer and even toward Miller Gorse was frequently one of thinly veiled amusement at their seriousness.  I often wondered that they did not resent it.  But he was a privileged person.

His cousin, Ham Durrett, whose inheritance was even greater than Ralph’s had been, had also become a privileged person whose comings and goings and more reputable doings were often recorded in the newspapers.  Ham had attained to what Gene Hollister aptly but inadvertently called “notoriety”:  as Ralph wittily remarked, Ham gave to polo and women that which might have gone into high finance.  He spent much of his time in the East; his conduct there and at home would once have created a black scandal in our community, but we were gradually leaving our Calvinism behind us and growing more tolerant:  we were ready to Forgive much to wealth especially if it was inherited.  Hostesses lamented the fact that Ham was “wild,” but they asked him to dinners and dances to meet their daughters.

If some moralist better educated and more far-seeing than Perry Blackwood (for Perry had become a moralist) had told these hostesses that Hambleton Durrett was a victim of our new civilization, they would have raised their eyebrows.  They deplored while they coveted.  If Ham had been told he was a victim of any sort, he would have laughed.