dued and ordered repose. Frederick was neither
comfortable nor happy. There was an unwonted flurry of life and
violation of sanctions and traditions. Meals were irregular and
protracted, and there were midnight chafing-dish suppers and bursts of
laughter at the most inappropriate hours.
Frederick was abstemious. A glass of wine at dinner was his wildest
excess. Three cigars a day he permitted himself, and these he smoked
either on the broad veranda or in the smoking room. What else was a
smoking room for? Cigarettes he detested. Yet his brother was ever
rolling thin, brown-paper cigarettes and smoking them wherever he might
happen to be. A litter of tobacco crumbs was always to be found in the
big easy chair he frequented and among the cushions of the window-seats.
Then there were the cocktails. Brought up under the stern tutelage of
Isaac and Eliza Travers, Frederick looked upon liquor in the house as an
abomination. Ancient cities had been smitten by God's wrath for just
such practices. Before lunch and dinner, Tom, aided and abetted by
Polly, mixed an endless variety of drinks, she being particularly adept
with strange swivel-stick concoctions learned at the ends of the earth.
To Frederick, at such times, it seemed that his butler's pantry and
dining room had been turned into bar-rooms. When he suggested this,
under a facetious show, Tom proclaimed that when he made his pile he
would build a liquor cabinet in every living room of his house.
And there were more young men at the house than formerly, and they
helped in disposing of the cocktails. Frederick would have liked to
account in that manner for their presence, but he knew better. His
brother and his brother's daughter did what he and Mary had failed to
do. They were the magnets. Youth and joy and laughter drew to them. The
house was lively with young life. Ever, day and night, the motor cars
honked up and down the gravelled drives. There were picnics and
expeditions in the summer weather, moonlight sails on the bay, starts
before dawn or home-comings at midnight, and often, of nights, the many
bedrooms were filled as they had never been before. Tom must cover all
his boyhood ramblings, catch trout again on Bull Creek, shoot quail over
Walcott's Prairie, get a deer on Round Mountain. That deer was a cause
of pain and shame to Frederick. What if it was closed season? Tom had
triumphantly brought home the buck and gleefully called it
sidehill-salmon when it was
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