te creation is as lazy as it dares
be, and man is no exception. Thus, the Ranger children, like all other
normal children of luxury, rarely made what would have been, for their
fallow minds, the arduous exertion of real thinking. When their minds
were not on pastimes or personalities they were either rattling round in
their heads or exchanging the ideas, real and reputed, that happened to
be drifting about, at the moment, in their "set." Those ideas they and
their friends received, and stored up or passed on with never a thought
as to whether they were true or false, much as they used coins or notes
they took in and paid out. Arthur and Adelaide soon wearied of their
groping about in the mystery of human society--how little direct interest
it had for them then! They drove on; the vision which had stimulated them
to think vanished; they took up again those personalities about friends,
acquaintances and social life that are to thinking somewhat as massage is
to exercise--all the motions of real activity, but none of its spirit.
They stopped for two calls and tea on the fashionable Bluffs.

When they reached home, content with tandem, drive, themselves, their
friends, and life in general, they found Hiram Ranger returned from work,
though it was only half-past five, and stretched on the sofa in the
sitting room, with his eyes shut. At this unprecedented spectacle of
inactivity they looked at each other in vague alarm; they were stealing
away, when he called: "I'm not asleep."

His expression made Adelaide impulsively kneel beside him and gaze
anxiously into his face. He smiled, roused himself to a sitting posture,
well concealing the effort the exertion cost him.

"Your father's getting old," he said, hiding his tragedy of aching body
and aching heart and impending doom in a hypocrisy of cheerfulness that
would have passed muster even had he not been above suspicion. "I'm not
up to the mark of the last generation. Your grandfather was fifty when I
was born, and he didn't die till I was fifty."

His face shadowed; Adelaide, glancing round for the cause, saw Simeon,
half-sitting, half-standing in the doorway, humble apology on his
weazened, whiskered face. He looked so like her memory-picture of her
grandfather that she burst out laughing. "Don't be hard on the poor old
gentleman, father," she cried. "How can you resist that appeal? Tell him
to come in and make himself at home."

As her father did not answer, she glanced