h his State accounted
him an orator. They corrected Mrs. Kittredge's etiquette, though
Hillsdale looked up to her as a social arbitrix.

Kittredge poured a deal of his disappointment into Rudd's ear, because
his hard heart was broken and breaking anew every day, and he had to
tell somebody. He knew that his old clerk would keep it where he kept
all the secrets of his business, but he never knew that Rudd still had a
child of his own, forging ahead without failure. Rudd could give
comfort, for he had it to spare, and he was empty of envy.

It was a ghastly morning when Kittredge showed Rudd a telegram saying
that his eldest son, Thomas, had thrown himself in front of a train
because of the discovery that his accounts were wrong. Kittredge had
found him a place in a New York bank, but the gambling fever had seized
the young fellow. And now he was dead, in his sins, in his shame. Dives
cried out to Lazarus:

"It's hell to be a father, Will. It's an awful thing to bring children
into the world and try to carry 'em through it. It's not a man's job.
It's God's."

At times like these, and when Rudd heard from the tattlers, or read in
the printed gossip of the evening paper concerning the multifarious
wickednesses of the children of men about the earth, he felt almost glad
that his boy had never lived upon so plague-infected a world. But in the
soothe of twilight the old pipe persuaded him to a pleasanter view of
his boy, alive and always doing the right thing, avoiding the evil.

His motto was, "Eric would have done different." He was sure of that. It
was his constant conclusion.

After graduating from an imaginary Yale Eric went to an imaginary
law-school in New York City--no less. Then he was admitted to that
imaginary bar where a lawyer never defends an unrighteous cause, never
loses a case, yet grows rich. And, of course, like every other American
boy that dreams or is dreamed of, in good time he had to become
President.

Eric lived so exemplary a life, was so busy in virtue, so unblemished of
fault, that he could not be overlooked by the managers of the
quadrennial national performance, searching with Demosthenes' lantern
for a man against whom nothing could be said. They called Eric from
private life to be headliner in their vaudeville.

Rudd had watched Kittredge clambering to his success, or rather
wallowing to it through a swamp of mud. All the wrong things Kittredge
had ever done, and their name was legion,