“There’s no use glowering at _me_ every time you speak of poor Clive,” protested Mrs. Conover with all the fierce courage of a chased guinea-pig. “It isn’t _my_ fault he’s running against you, and it isn’t my fault that he’s my nephew, either.” “I guess both those failings would come under the head of misfortunes, rather’n faults,” retorted Caleb. “And they’re both as hard on him as they are on you, Letty. I wasn’t glowering at you, either. Don’t stir up another spat.” The idea that Mr. Conover was capable of inciting any such disputation so flattered that poor, spiritless little creature that she actually bridled and looked about her to make sure Anice and Gerald, the only other members of the household present, had heard. The quartette were seated in the Conover library, whither they had gathered after dinner for one of those brief intervals of family intercourse which Caleb secretly loved, his wife as secretly dreaded and Gerald openly loathed. The Railroader, at heart, was an intensely home-loving man. He had never known a home. Least of all since moving into the Mausoleum. He had always, in increasingly blundering fashion, sought to make one. The wife he bullied, the son he hectored, the daughter with whom he had forever quarrelled, the secretary who met his friendliness with unbroken reserve; all these he had tried to enroll as assistants in his various homemaking plans. The results had not been so successful as to warrant description. Finally, Conover had centred his former efforts on one daily plan. He had read in the advice column of the _Star_ about the joys of “pleasant evening hour in the bosom of one’s family” and the directions therefor. The idea appealed to him. He ordained accordingly that after the unfashionably early evening meal the household should congregate in the library, and there for at least one hour indulge in carefree confidential chat. This, Caleb mentally argued, was a capital opening wedge in the inculcation of the true home-spirit which had been his lifelong dream. The household obeyed the order, even as all Conover’s orders—at home and abroad—were obeyed. The session usually began in laborious efforts at small talk. Then an unfortunate remark of some sort from Mrs. Conover, or an impertinence or sneer from Gerald, and the storm would break. The “pleasant evening hour” oftener than not ended in a sea of weakly miserable tears from Mrs. Conover, a cowed or _sotto voce_ profane exit on Gerald’s part, and in Caleb’s stamping off to his study or else around to the Kerrigans’ for a blissful, shirt-sleeved, old-time political argument in front of the saloon’s back-room stove.