Ronald’s ability to do well almost equalled his gift of looking well.  Mr. Grew constantly affirmed to himself that the boy was “not a genius”; but, barring this slight deficiency, he was almost everything that a parent could wish.  Even at Harvard he had managed to be several desirable things at once—­writing poetry in the college magazine, playing delightfully “by ear,” acquitting himself honorably in his studies, and yet holding his own in the fashionable sporting set that formed, as it were, the gateway of the temple of Society.  Mr. Grew’s idealism did not preclude the frank desire that his son should pass through that gateway; but the wish was not prompted by material considerations.  It was Mr. Grew’s notion that, in the rough and hurrying current of a new civilization, the little pools of leisure and enjoyment must nurture delicate growths, material graces as well as moral refinements, likely to be uprooted and swept away by the rush of the main torrent.  He based his theory on the fact that he had liked the few “society” people he had met—­had found their manners simpler, their voices more agreeable, their views more consonant with his own, than those of the leading citizens of Wingfield.  But then he had met very few.

Ronald’s sympathies needed no urging in the same direction.  He took naturally, dauntlessly, to all the high and exceptional things about which his father’s imagination had so long sheepishly and ineffectually hovered—­from the start he was what Mr. Grew had dreamed of being.  And so precise, so detailed, was Mr. Grew’s vision of his own imaginary career, that as Ronald grew up, and began to travel in a widening orbit, his father had an almost uncanny sense of the extent to which that career was enacting itself before him.  At Harvard, Ronald had done exactly what the hypothetical Mason Grew would have done, had not his actual self, at the same age, been working his way up in old Slagden’s button factory—­the institution which was later to acquire fame, and even notoriety, as the birthplace of Grew’s Secure Suspender Buckle.  Afterward, at a period when the actual Grew had passed from the factory to the bookkeeper’s desk, his invisible double had been reading law at Columbia—­precisely again what Ronald did!  But it was when the young man left the paths laid out for him by the parental hand, and cast himself boldly on the world, that his adventures began to bear the most astonishing resemblance to those of the unrealized Mason Grew.  It was in New York that the scene of this hypothetical being’s first exploits had always been laid; and it was in New York that Ronald was to achieve his first triumph.  There was nothing small or timid about Mr. Grew’s imagination; it had never stopped at anything between Wingfield and the metropolis.  And the real Ronald had the same cosmic vision as his parent.  He brushed aside with a contemptuous laugh his mother’s tearful entreaty that he should stay at Wingfield and continue the dynasty of the Grew Suspender Buckle.