A few days later Albert was transferred to his mother's place in the country. Raymond consoled himself as best he might with the thought that this sojourn was, after all, but preliminary, as Gertrude had herself implied, to the coming month on the Maine coast or at Mackinac. A change of air, a greater change of air, a change to an air immensely and unmistakably and immediately tonic and upbuilding--that, as his mother stated, with emphasis, was what Albert required. So Albert, by way of introduction to his real summer, came to be domiciled under the splendid new roof of Johnny McComas--a roof, to Raymond's exacerbated sense, gleaming but heavy. Its tiles--he had not seen them, but he readily visualized them--bore him down. He was not obliged, as yet, to meet McComas himself. That came later. PART VII I Albert recovered in due season--a little more rapidly, it may be, than if he had stayed with his father, but not more completely. His education progressed, entering another phase, and still with the unauthorized cooeperation of his mother. During his stay with her she had really wrought no great havoc in his wardrobe, whatever she may have accomplished on a previous occasion. In fact, Albert had reached the point where he dressed in a manlier fashion--a fashion fortunately standardized beyond a mother's whims. In his turn, as it had been with his brothers by marriage, it was now the real preparatory school, with college looming ahead. By this time Raymond had completely made his belated adieux to aesthetic concerns and had begun to concentrate on practical matters--on his own. They needed his attention, even if he had not the right quality of attention to give. I had my doubts, and they did not grow less as time went on. Raymond was now within hail of fifty, and he added to his long list of earlier mistakes a new mistake peculiar to his years and to his training--or his lack of it. Briefly, he assumed that age in itself brought knowledge, and that young men in their twenties--even their late twenties--were but boys. The disadvantage of holding this view became apparent when he began to do business with them. He depended too much on his own vague fund of experience, and did not realize how dangerous it might be to encounter keen specialists--however young--in their own field. He was now engaged in a general recasting of his affairs, and they came to him in numbers--bright, boyish, young fellows, he called them. He tended to patronize them, and he began to deal with them rather informally and much too confidently.