a that Peter yielded to her mandates as to the
inarticulate cry of his own soul translated into words. The princess
in whose veins his blood ran must understand what he ought to want
better than he himself could understand.
She said: What was the fun of having money if you couldn't know all
the best people everywhere, and be of them as well as merely among
them? She began saying this even before she came home "for good" from
school. It was a school for millionaires' daughters, and the daughters
of other millionaires had showed her the difference between her father
and theirs, oil magnates and steel and railway magnates, and magnates
who magnated on their ancestors' fortunes made in land or skins of
animals.
Nothing really worth having--nothing really worth father's years of
hard work--could come to them as a family until Peter Rolls ceased to
identify himself personally with the Hands, Ena had pleaded, and at
last the head of the establishment engaged an official "understudy" to
represent him every day in the gorgeously furnished office which had
seemed to old Peter what the body is to the soul.
Rolls senior and Henry Croft, the man he appointed as dictator,
corresponded daily, by letter and telephone, but Peter Rolls himself
was not supposed to enter the great commercial village he had brought
together under one roof. Ena was able to say to any one rude enough to
ask, or to those she suspected of indiscreet curiosity: "Father never
goes _near_ the place. He's tired of business, and, luckily, he
doesn't need to bother."
She would not much have cared whether the statement were true or not
if she were sure that the carefully careless sounding words were
believed. But it would have been distressing to have any one say: "Ena
Rolls pretends that her father doesn't work in the shop any more, but
I know for a fact that he goes every day." So it comforted her to feel
sure that her arguments had really impressed father and that he never
did go to the Hands unless, perhaps twice a year or so for important
meetings. It pleased her that he had joined a rich club in New York
which had enough "swell" members to make it pleasant for her to remark
casually, "Father belongs to the Gotham."
When father went to New York in the evening, as he often did, not
returning to Sea Gull Manor till late, and sometimes staying away all
night, he used to say as an excuse to mother or Ena: "I'm going to the
club." After a while it was taken
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