or a dozen years, their surface life was pleasanter.
And even that small improvement cheered him greatly. He was thankful for
such a peace, even when he knew that he had bought it at a heavy price.

The other was his work. The directorate for the new munition plant had
been selected, and on Thursday of that week he gave a dinner at his club
to the directors. It had been gratifying to him to find how easily
his past reputation carried the matter of the vast credits needed, how
absolutely his new board deferred to his judgment. The dinner became, in
a way, an ovation. He was vastly pleased and a little humbled. He wanted
terribly to make good, to justify their faith in him. They were the big
financial men of his time, and they were agreeing to back his judgment
to the fullest extent.

When the dinner was over, a few of the younger men were in no mood to
go home. They had dined and wined, and the night was young. Denis Nolan,
who had been present as the attorney for the new concern, leaned back in
his chair and listened to them with a sort of tolerant cynicism.

"Oh, go home, you fellows," he said at last. "You make me sick. Enough's
enough. Why the devil does every dinner like this have to end in a
debauch?"

In the end, however, both he and Clayton went along, Clayton at least
frankly anxious to keep an eye on one or two of them until they started
home. He had the usual standards, of course, except for himself. A man's
private life, so long as he was not a bounder, concerned him not at all.
But this had been his dinner. He meant to see it through. Once or twice
he had seen real tragedy come to men as a result of the recklessness of
long dinners, many toasts and the instinct to go on and make a night of
it.

Afterward they went to a midnight roof-garden, and at first it was
rather dreary. Their youth was only comparative after all, and the eyes
of the girls who danced and sang passed over them, to rest on boys in
their twenties.

Nolan chuckled.

"Pathetic!" he said. "The saddest sight in the world! Every one of
you here would at this moment give up everything he's got to be under
thirty."

"Oh, shut up!" some one said, almost savagely.

"Of course, there are compensations," he drawled. "At twenty you want to
take the entire bunch home and keep 'em. At thirty you know you can't,
but you still want to. At forty and over you don't want them at all, but
you think it's damned curious they don't want you."

Clayto