out, his glasses on
his nose, a family Bible under his arm. "Glad to see you, Matthew," said he
with saintly kindliness, giving me a friendly hand. "We are just about to
offer up our evening prayer. Come right in."

I followed him into the back parlor. Both it and the front parlor were
lighted; in a sort of circle extending into both rooms were all the
Roebucks and the four servants. "This is my friend, Matthew Blacklock,"
said he, and the Roebucks in the circle gravely bowed. He drew up a chair
for me, and we seated ourselves. Amid a solemn hush, he read a chapter from
the big Bible spread out upon his lean lap. My glance wandered from face to
face of the Roebucks, as plainly dressed as were their servants. I was able
to look freely, mine being the only eyes not bent upon the floor.

It was the first time in my life that I had witnessed family prayers.
When I was a boy at home, my mother had taken literally the Scriptural
injunction to pray in secret--in a closet, I think the passage of the Bible
said. Many times each day she used to retire to a closet under the stairway
and spend from one to twenty minutes shut in there. But we had no family
prayers. I was therefore deeply interested in what was going on in those
countrified parlors of one of the richest and most powerful men in the
world--and this right in the heart of that district of New York where
palaces stand in rows and in blocks, and where such few churches as there
are resemble social clubs for snubbing climbers and patronizing the poor.

It was astonishing how much every Roebuck in that circle, even the old
lady, looked like Roebuck himself--the same smug piety, the same underfed
appearance that, by the way, more often indicates a starved soul than
a starved body. One difference--where his face had the look of power
that compels respect and, to the shrewd, reveals relentless strength
relentlessly used, the expressions of the others were simply small and
mean and frost-nipped. And that is the rule--the second generation of a
plutocrat inherits, with his money, the meanness that enabled him to hoard
it, but not the scope that enabled him to make it.

So absorbed was I in the study of the influence of his terrible
master-character upon those closest to it, that I started when he said:
"Let us pray." I followed the example of the others, and knelt. The audible
prayer was offered up by his oldest daughter, Mrs. Wheeler, a widow.
Roebuck punctuated each paragrap