“Then I began to look forward to the time when her money would give out.  She went to Paris with another young woman, and studied there, and then to England.  She came back to New York, hired an apartment and a studio, and has made a success.”

The rector seemed to detect an unwilling note of pride at the magic word.

“It isn’t the kind of success I think much of, but it’s what she started out to do.  She comes out to see me, once in a while, and she designed that garden.”

He halted in front of the clergyman.

“I suppose you think it’s strange, my telling you this,” he said.  “It has come to the point,” he declared vehemently, “where it relieves me to tell somebody, and you seem to be a man of discretion and common-sense.”

Hodder looked down into Mr. Parr’s face, and was silent.  Perhaps he recognized, as never before, the futility of the traditional words of comfort, of rebuke.  He beheld a soul in torture, and realized with sudden sharpness how limited was his knowledge of the conditions of existence of his own time.  Everywhere individualism reared its ugly head, everywhere it seemed plausible to plead justification; and once more he encountered that incompatibility of which Mrs. Constable had spoken!  He might blame the son, blame the daughter, yet he could not condemn them utterly . . . .  One thing he saw clearly, that Eldon Parr had slipped into what was still, for him, a meaningless hell.

The banker’s manner suddenly changed, reverted to what it had been.  He arose.

“I’ve tried to do my duty as I saw it, and it comes to this—­that we who have spent the best years of our lives in striving to develop this country have no thanks from our children or from any one else.”

With his hand on the electric switch, he faced Hodder almost defiantly as he spoke these words, and suddenly snapped off the light, as though the matter admitted of no discussion.  In semi-darkness they groped down the upper flight of stairs . . . .

CHAPTER VII

THE KINGDOMS OF THE WORLD

I

When summer arrived, the birds of brilliant plumage of Mr. Hodder’s flock arose and flew lightly away, thus reversing the seasons.  Only the soberer ones came fluttering into the cool church out of the blinding heat, and settled here and there throughout the nave.  The ample Mr. Bradley, perspiring in an alpaca coat, took up the meagre collection on the right of the centre aisle; for Mr. Parr, properly heralded, had gone abroad on one of those periodical, though lonely tours that sent anticipatory shivers of delight down the spines of foreign picture-dealers.  The faithful Gordon Atterbury was worshipping at the sea, and even Mr. Constable and Mr. Plimpton, when recalled to the city by financial cares, succumbed to the pagan influence of the sun, and were usually to be found on Sunday mornings on the wide veranda of the country club, with glasses containing liquid and ice beside them, and surrounded by heaps of newspapers.