s became a regular thing to look forward to
there was built up between them a fabric of friendship that grew to be
something unique to both. Those things which had happened to Judy had
taught her every tolerance and sympathy.

They were not on the whole bad, those years that followed. Nicky, after
writing more or less regularly, suddenly announced his intention of
coming home again, and Ishmael was filled with a joy that no personal
thing had had power to wake in him since the boy had gone. The thought
of Nicky had seldom been far from him; always it was with the idea of
Nicky in the forefront of his mind that he worked for Cloom. When he had
first taken on the idea of Cloom as the central scheme of his life it
had been for Cloom itself, or rather for the building up of an ideal
Cloom which his father's conduct had shattered. Now he realised that if
he had had no son to inherit after him his work would not have held the
same deep significance for him, even though it was not with any
conscious idea of a son that he had started on his task. Now, since
Nicky's departure, he had begun to see how incomplete the whole scheme
would have been without him, how incomplete it would still be if Nicky
wanted to wander all his days, or if modernity and the new country over
the sea should have come to mean more to him than the old. He knew by
Nicky's letter that this was not so, and his heart sang within him. For
days after the letter came a glamour that to his eyes the world had lost
illuminated it once again.

The 'nineties, young and go-ahead as they felt to themselves, did not
seem to Ishmael nearly as wonderful as the 'seventies, which had seen so
much deeper changes. This world--in which people now moved so
complacently talking of Ibsen and Wilde, of weird Yellow Books of which
he heard from Judith, and many other things all designated as
_fin-de-siecle_--he had seen it in the making. The very children growing
up in his house, the plump little Ruth and the clever, impatient Lissa,
they thought they knew so much more than he did because they had been
born so much later; and so in a way they did, in as much as the younger
generation always sees more truly because it has not had time to collect
so many prejudices, but can come straight and fresh to setting right
the problems of the world. But what Lissa and Ruth did not yet realise
as he did was that the day would come when children born in the new
century would look upon them wit