d as she spoke the mild
leonine countenance of Mr. Culpeper, vaguely resembling some playful and
domesticated king of beasts, appeared at the door of his dressing-room.

"Do you wish to see me, my boy?" he asked affectionately. "We were just
wondering if you had forgotten and stayed at the club."

"No, I wasn't at the club. I've been looking over the Culpeper estate--a
part of it." Stephen's voice trembled in spite of the effort he made to
keep it impersonal and indifferent. "Father, do you know anything about
those old houses beyond Marshall Street?"

It was the peculiar distinction of Mr. Culpeper that, in a community
where everybody talked all the time, he had been able to form the habit
of silence. While his acquaintances continually vociferated opinions,
scandals, experiences, or anecdotes, he remained imperturbably reticent
and subdued. All that he responded now to Stephen's outburst was, "Has
anybody offered to buy them?"

"Why, what in the world!" exclaimed Mrs. Culpeper, who was neither
reticent nor subdued. From the depths of the mirror her bright brown
eyes gazed back at her husband, while she fastened a cameo pin,
containing the head of Minerva framed in pearls, in the rose-point on
her bosom.

"To buy them?" repeated Stephen. "Why, they are horrors, Father, to live
in--crumbling, insanitary horrors! And yet the rent has been doubled in
the last two or three years."

From the mirror his mother's face looked back at him, so small and
clear and delicately tinted that it seemed to him merely an exaggerated
copy of the cameo on her bosom, "I hope that means we shall have a
little more to live on next year," she said reflectively, while the
expression that Mary Byrd impertinently called her "economic look"
appeared in her eyes. "What with the high cost of everything, and the
low interest on Liberty Bonds, and the innumerable relief organizations
to which one is simply forced to contribute, it has been almost
impossible to make two ends meet. Poor Mary Byrd hasn't been able to
give a single party this winter."

Before Stephen's gaze there passed a vision of the dingy basement room,
the embittered face of the woman, the sickly tow-headed children, the
man who could not lift his eyes from the hole in the carpet, and the
baby with that look of having been born not young, but old, the look of
pre-natal experience and disillusionment. And he heard Darrow's dry
voice complaining because the well-to-do classes st