was left to see the
justness of the point and to act on it for himself. I gathered, later,
that James Prince had done little, unaided, for himself; whatever he had
accomplished had been in conjunction with other men--with his father,
particularly; and when his father died, a few years later, he was the
chief heir--and he never added much to what he had received. To him fell
the property--and its worries. The worries, I surmise, were the greater
part of it all. Everything has to be paid for, and James Prince's easily
gained success was paid for, through the ensuing years, with
considerable anxieties and perturbations.

It was his father, I presume, who was with him as I passed the library
door: a bent, gray man, with a square head and a yellow face. A third
man was between them; a tall, dry, cold fellow with iron-gray beard and
no mustache--a face in the old New England tradition. This man was, of
course, their lawyer, and I judge that he gave them little comfort. I
felt him as chill and slow, as enjoying the tying and untying of
legalities with a stiff, clammy hand, and as unlikely to be hurried on
account of any temperament possessed by himself or manifested by his
clients. Fire, in a wide sweep, had overtaken the town a year or two
before--a community owned by the Eastern seaboard and mortgaged to its
eyebrows; and the Princes, as I learned years later, had been building
extensively on borrowed capital just before the fire-doom came. Probably
too great a part of the funds employed came from their own bank.

Raymond, once the second floor was reached, showed me his desks and
bookcases; also a new sort of pen which he had thought to be able to
use, but which he had cast aside. And he offered to read me his account
of the three days in Milwaukee, or wherever.

"If you would like to hear...?" he said, with a sort of bashful
determination.

"Just as you please," I replied, patient then, as ever after, in the
face of the arts.

Nothing much seemed to have happened--nothing that I, at least, should
have taken the trouble to set down; but a good part of his fifteen
pages, as he read them, seemed interesting and even important. I suppose
this came from the way he did it. As early as thirteen he had the
knack; then, and always after, he enjoyed writing for its own sake. I
feel sure that his father did not quite approve this taste. His
grandfather, who had had a lesser education and felt an exaggerated
respect for learning