"Then let some one shoulder it. Bob doesn’t have to saddle himself with it, unless—" Convinced that, in the presence of his father, his mother wouldn’t speak too openly, Bob felt safe in a challenge. "Yes, mother? Unless—what?" Mother and son exchanged a long look. "Unless you go—very far out of your way." "Well, suppose I did go—very far out of my way?" "I should have to leave it with your father to deal with that." "Well, it wouldn’t be the first time dad’s been philanthropic." Collingham looked up wearily. He was sitting with one leg thrown across the other, his left hand stroking Dauphin’s silky head. "You can be as philanthropic as you like outside business, Bob," he said, with schooled, hopeless conviction. "Inside, it’s no go. Once you admit the principle of treating your employees philanthropically, business methods are at an end." "I don’t think modern economics would agree with you, daddy," Edith objected. "Aren’t we beginning to realize that the well-being of employees, even when they’re no longer of much use—" Collingham looked up with a kind of longing in his eyes. "I wish I could believe that, Edie, but an efficiency expert wouldn’t bear you out." "An efficiency expert doesn’t know everything. He studies nothing but the individual private, whereas a political economist knows what’s going on all up and down the line." To Collingham this was like the doctrine of universal salvation to a Calvinist theologian. He would have seized it had he dared, but for daring it was too late. He had trained himself otherwise. On a basis of expert advice and individual efficiency Collingham & Law’s had been built up. All he could do was to grasp at the personal. "Where did you hear that?" "You can read all about it in Mr. Ayling’s last book, _The Economic Value of Good Will_." As she passed through the French window into the house, her mother turned with a gesture of both outspread hands. "There! You see! What did I tell you? She has the effrontery to read his books and name him openly." But too dispirited to take up the gauntlet, Collingham looked, with welcome, toward Gossip, who appeared in the doorway with the tea. CHAPTER IV The Folletts came together every evening about six, chiefly by the process known to American cities as commuting. Commuting brought them to Number Eleven Indiana Avenue, Pemberton Heights. Seen from the New York river-front, Pemberton Heights, on top of a great cliff on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, suggests a battlemented parapet. By day, its outline is a fringe against the sky; by night, its clustering lights are like a constellation.