"A hypocrite," the shallow reader will exclaim, but no word would be farther from the truth, for the real and only hypocrite is he who, having light to see the highest things, deliberately uses them to serve his lower instincts. Masterman did nothing of the kind. He simply had no higher light. Not even a jury with a damaging verdict, or a judge with a scathing allocution, could have convinced him that it was a wrong time to write a bogus cheque in an emergency, when twenty thousand pounds hung upon the chance of his deceit being undiscovered. He would have done it again to-morrow, done it proudly, with a kind of fearless, misguided heroism. Life was like that, he would have said; you took your chances. And what he would have said and done at thirty-five, he would have said and done at fifty. There was a hard, unmalleable quality in the man that turned the edge of all those fine ethics which the preachers uttered. It was their duty to utter them, no doubt; it was what they were paid to do; but what did they know of life? What did John Clark, the minister of Highbourne Gardens Church, comfortably paid, and living in a good house, know of life as Masterman had found it? He was like a child playing in the shallows; he had never known deadly contest with tides, and waves, and tempests. So Masterman listened to him with a kindly irony, and went upon his way totally unmoved by any delicate displays of pulpit rhetoric. Yet of late things had somewhat altered; he was conscious that there was a changed atmosphere in the world. John Clark was preaching a different kind of sermon, a bolder, plainer sermon, full of pungent references to public evils and daily conduct. That would not have mattered much, for Masterman was perfectly aware that he was John Clark's master whenever he might choose to assert the rights of the purse. But a much more pertinent and painful problem was gradually rising in Masterman's own household. He had but two children, Helen and Arthur, and upon the boy all his hopes were set. He had sent him to Oxford, where he had done tolerably well; from the University he had returned with a fund of new ideas which were to his father strange and detestable. And among them was a vague socialism, which displayed itself in vehement attacks on the common processes by which wealth was acquired. There came a day when Masterman was aware, for the first time, that he was face to face with a separate personality in his son, which had its own springs of action and claimed its own liberty of thought. And as the boy uttered his youthful diatribes, the father began to wonder how much he knew about his own life, how far those diatribes might be directed obliquely against himself.