He was vividly aware of the stir his entrance caused among the office employees.  It was as though the heart of the office skipped a beat.  He flushed, and, with eyes straight before him, hurried into his own room and sat in his chair.  He experienced a quivering, electric emptiness—­his nerves crying out against an approaching climax.  It was blood-relative to panic.

Presently he was aware that his father stood in the door scrutinizing him.  Bonbright’s eyes encountered his father’s.  They seemed to lock ...  In that tense moment the boy was curiously aware how perfectly his father’s physical presence stood for and expressed his theory of being.  Tall, unbending, slender, aristocratic, intellectual—­the pose of the body, the poise of the head, even that peculiar, slanting set of the lips expressed perfectly the Bonbright Foote idea.  Five generations had bred him to be the perfect thing it desired.

“Well, sir,” he said, coldly.  Bonbright arose.  There was a formality about the situation which seemed to require it.  “Good morning,” he said, in a low tone.

“I have seen the papers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What they printed was in substance true?”

“I prefer not—­to discuss it, sir.”

“And I prefer to discuss it ...  Do you fancy you can drag the name of Foote through the daily press as though it were that of some dancing girl or political mountebank, and have no reference made of it?  Tell me exactly what happened last night—­and why it was permitted to happen.”

“Father—­” Bonbright’s voice was scarcely audible, yet it was alive and quivering with pain.  “I cannot talk to you about last night.”

The older man’s lips compressed.  “You are a man grown—­are supposed to be a man grown.  Must I cross-examine you as if you were a sulking schoolboy?”

Bonbright was not defiant, not sulkily stubborn.  His night’s experiences had affected, were affecting him, working far-reaching changes in him, maturing him.  But he was too close to them for their effect to have been accomplished.  The work was going on each moment, each hour.  He did not reply to his father immediately, but when he did so it was with a certain decision, a firmness, a lack of the old boyishness which was marked and distinct.

“You must not cross-question me.  There are things about which one’s own father has not the right to ask. ...  If I could have come to you voluntarily—­but I could not.  In college I have seen fellows get into trouble, and the first thing they thought of was to go to their fathers with it ...  It was queer.  What happened last night happened to me.  Possibly it will have some effect on my family and on the name of Foote, as you say ...  But it happened to me.  Nobody else can understand it.  No one has the right to ask about it.”

“It happened to you!  Young man, you are the seventh Bonbright Foote—­ member of a family.  What happens to you happens to it.  You cannot separate yourself from it.  You, as an individual, are not important, but as Bonbright Foote VII you become important.  Do you imagine you can act and think as an entity distinct from Bonbright Foote, Incorporated? ...  Nonsense.  You are but one part of a whole; what you do affects the whole, and you are responsible for it to the shops.”