sophisticated women, single and married, who saw
through it all and liked him just the same, but they did not make
society. He was virtually an outcast, and nothing could save him but
to reform his ways; in other words, he must give up Jennie once and
for all.

But he did not want to do this. The thought was painful to
him--objectionable in every way. Jennie was growing in mental
acumen. She was beginning to see things quite as clearly as he did.
She was not a cheap, ambitious, climbing creature. She was a big woman
and a good one. It would be a shame to throw her down, and besides she
was good-looking. He was forty-six and she was twenty-nine; and she
looked twenty-four or five. It is an exceptional thing to find beauty,
youth, compatibility, intelligence, your own point of
view--softened and charmingly emotionalized--in another. He
had made his bed, as his father had said. He had better lie on it.

It was only a little while after this disagreeable newspaper
incident that Lester had word that his father was quite ill and
failing; it might be necessary for him to go to Cincinnati at any
moment. Pressure of work was holding him pretty close when the news
came that his father was dead. Lester, of course, was greatly shocked
and grieved, and he returned to Cincinnati in a retrospective and
sorrowful mood. His father had been a great character to him--a
fine and interesting old gentleman entirely aside from his
relationship to him as his son. He remembered him now dandling him
upon his knee as a child, telling him stories of his early life in
Ireland, and of his subsequent commercial struggle when he was a
little older, impressing the maxims of his business career and his
commercial wisdom on him as he grew to manhood. Old Archibald had been
radically honest. It was to him that Lester owed his instincts for
plain speech and direct statement of fact. "Never lie," was
Archibald's constant, reiterated statement. "Never try to make a thing
look different from what it is to you. It's the breath of
life--truth--it's the basis of real worth, while commercial
success--it will make a notable character of any one who will
stick to it." Lester believed this. He admired his father intensely
for his rigid insistence on truth, and now that he was really gone he
felt sorry. He wished he might have been spared to be reconciled to
him. He half fancied that old Archibald would have liked Jennie if he
had known her. He did not imagine th