ad come a sharp heavy jolt. His business had suffered from long
neglect, and suddenly for two anxious weeks he had found himself facing
bankruptcy. Edith's husband, a lawyer, had come to his aid and together
they had pulled out of the hole. But he had been forced to mortgage the
house. And this had brought to a climax all the feelings of guiltiness
which had so long been stirring within him over his failure to live up to
the promise he had made his wife.

And so Roger had looked at his children.

And at first to his profound surprise he had had it forced upon him that
these were three grown women, each equipped with her own peculiar feminine
traits and desires, the swift accumulations of lives which had expanded in
a city that had reared to the skies in the many years of his long sleep.
But very slowly, month by month, he had gained a second impression which
seemed to him deeper and more real. To the eye they were grown women all,
but inwardly they were children still, each groping for her happiness and
each held back as he had been, either by checks within herself or by the
gay distractions of the absorbing city. He saw each of his daughters, parts
of himself. And he remembered what Judith had said: "You will live on in
our children's lives." And he began to get glimmerings of a new
immortality, made up of generations, an endless succession of other lives
extending into the future.

Some of all this he remembered now, in scattered fragments here and there.
Then from somewhere far away a great bell began booming the hour, and it
roused him from his revery. He had often heard the bell of late. A calm
deep-toned intruder, it had first struck in upon his attention something
over two years ago. Vaguely he had wondered about it. Soon he had found it
was on the top of a tower a little to the north, one of the highest
pinnacles of this tumultuous modern town. But the bell was not tumultuous.
And as he listened it seemed to say, "There is still time, but you have not
long."

Edith, sitting opposite him, looked up at the sound with a stir of relief.
Ten o'clock. It was time to go home.

"I wonder what's keeping Bruce," she said. Bruce was still in his office
downtown. As a rule on Friday evenings he came with his wife to supper
here, but this week he had some new business on hand. Edith was vague about
it. As she tried to explain she knitted her brows and said that Bruce was
working too hard. And her father grunted assent.