far as I'm concerned you have that. I don't hold any grudge against you. I won't."
Robert looked at him fixedly. He half smiled. He admired Lester in spite
of all that he had done to him—in spite of all that Lester was doing to him now.
"I don't know but what you're right, Lester," he admitted finally. "I didn't make this offer in any petty spirit though. I wanted to patch up this matter of feeling between us. I won't say anything more about it. You're not
coming down to Cincinnati soon, are you?"
"I don't expect to," replied Lester.
"If you do I'd like to have you come and stay with us. Bring your wife.
We could talk over old times."
Lester smiled an enigmatic smile.
"I'll be glad to," he said, without emotion. But he remembered that in the days of Jennie it was different. They would never have receded from their position regarding her. "Well," he thought, "perhaps I can't blame them.
Let it go."
They talked on about other things. Finally Lester remembered an
appointment. "I'll have to leave you soon," he said, looking at his watch.
"I ought to go, too," said Robert. They rose. "Well, anyhow," he added, as they walked toward the cloakroom, "we won't be absolute strangers in the future, will we?"
"Certainly not," said Lester. "I'll see you from time to time." They shook hands and separated amicably. There was a sense of unsatisfied obligation and some remorse in Robert's mind as he saw his brother walking briskly
away. Lester was an able man. Why was it that there was so much feeling
between them—had been even before Jennie had appeared? Then he
remembered his old thoughts about "snaky deeds." That was what his brother lacked, and that only. He was not crafty; not darkly cruel, hence.
"What a world!" he thought.
On his part Lester went away feeling a slight sense of opposition to, but also of sympathy for, his brother. He was not so terribly bad—not
different from other men. Why criticise? What would he have done if he
had been in Robert's place? Robert was getting along. So was he. He
could see now how it all came about—why he had been made the victim,
why his brother had been made the keeper of the great fortune. "It's the way the world runs," he thought, "What difference does it make? I have enough to live on. Why not let it go at that?"
CHAPTER LXI
The days of man under the old dispensation, or, rather, according to that supposedly biblical formula, which persists, are threescore years and ten.
It is so ingrained in the race-consciousness by mouth-to-mouth utterance
that it seems the profoundest of truths. As a matter of fact, man, even
under his mortal illusion, is organically built to live five times the period of his maturity, and would do so if he but knew that it is spirit which
endures, that age is an illusion, and that there is no death. Yet the race-thought, gained from what dream of materialism we know not, persists,
and the death of man under the mathematical formula so fearfully
accepted is daily registered.
Lester was one of those who believed in this formula. He was nearing
sixty. He thought he had, say, twenty years more at the utmost to live—
perhaps not so long. Well, he had lived comfortably. He felt that he could not complain. If death was coming, let it come. He was ready at any time.
No complaint or resistance would issue from him. Life, in most of its
aspects, was a silly show anyhow.
He admitted that it was mostly illusion—easily proved to be so. That it
might all be one he sometimes suspected. It was very much like a dream
in its composition truly—sometimes like a very bad dream. All he had to
sustain him in his acceptance of its reality from hour to hour and day to day was apparent contact with this material proposition and that—people,
meetings of boards of directors, individuals and organisations planning to do this and that, his wife's social functions. Letty loved him as a fine, grizzled example of a philosopher. She admired, as Jennie had, his solid, determined, phlegmatic attitude in the face of troubled circumstance. All the winds of fortune or misfortune could not apparently excite or disturb Lester. He refused to be frightened. He refused to budge from his beliefs and feelings, and usually had to be pushed away from them, still
believing, if he were gotten away at all. He refused to do anything save as he always said, "Look the facts in the face" and fight. He could be made to fight easily enough if imposed upon, but only in a stubborn, resisting way. His plan was to resist every effort to coerce him to the last ditch. If he had to let go in the end he would when compelled, but his views as to
the value of not letting go were quite the same even when he had let go
under compulsion.
His views of living were still decidedly material, grounded in creature
comforts, and he had always insisted upon having the best of everything.
If the furnishings of his home became the least dingy he was for having
them torn out and sold and the house done over. If he travelled, money
must go ahead of him and smooth the way. He did not want argument,
useless talk, or silly palaver as he called it. Every one must discuss
interesting topics with him or not talk at all. Letty understood him
thoroughly. She would chuck him under the chin mornings, or shake his
solid head between her hands, telling him he was a brute, but a nice kind of brute. "Yes, yes," he would growl. "I know. I'm an animal, I suppose.
You're a seraphic suggestion of attenuated thought."
"No; you hush," she would reply, for at times he could cut like a knife without really meaning to be unkind. Then he would pet her a little, for, in spite of her vigorous conception of life, he realised that she was more or less dependent upon him. It was always so plain to her that he could
get along without her. For reasons of kindliness he was trying to conceal this, to pretend the necessity of her presence, but it was so obvious that he really could dispense with her easily enough. Now Letty did depend upon
Lester. It was something, in so shifty and uncertain a world, to be near so fixed and determined a quantity as this bear-man. It was like being close to a warmly glowing lamp in the dark or a bright burning fire in the cold.
Lester was not afraid of anything. He felt that he knew how to live and to die.
It was natural that a temperament of this kind should have its solid,
material manifestation at every point. Having his financial affairs well in hand, most of his holding being shares of big companies, where boards of
solemn directors merely approved the strenuous efforts of ambitious
executives to "make good," he had leisure for living. He and Letty were fond of visiting the various American and European watering-places. He
gambled a little, for he found that there was considerable diversion in
risking interesting sums on the spin of a wheel or the fortuitous roll of a ball; and he took more and more to drinking, not in the sense that a
drunkard takes to it, but as a high liver, socially, and with all his friends.
He was inclined to drink the rich drinks when he did not take straight
whiskey—champagne, sparkling Burgundy, the expensive and
effervescent white wines. When he drank he could drink a great deal, and
he ate in proportion. Nothing must be served but the best—soup, fish,
entree, roast, game, dessert—everything that made up a showy dinner—