Mrs. Muir’s distaste for her son’s unavoidable connection with the man he might succeed had a firm foundation. She had been brought up in a Scottish Manse where her father dominated as an omnipotent and almost divine authority. As a child of imagination she had not been happy but she had been obedient. In her girlhood she had varied from type through her marriage with a young man who was a dreamer, an advanced thinker, an impassioned Greek scholar and a lover of beauty. After he had released her from her terrors of damnation, they had been profoundly happy. They were young and at ease and they read and thought together ardently. They explored new creeds and cults and sometimes found themselves talking nonsense and sometimes discovering untrodden paths of wisdom. They were youthful enough to be solemn about things at times, and clever enough to laugh at their solemnity when they awakened to it. Helen Muir left the reverent gloom of the life at the Manse far behind despite her respect for certain meanings they beclouded. “I live in a new structure,” she said to her husband, “but it is built on a foundation which is like a solid subterranean chamber. I don’t use the subterranean chamber or go into it. I don’t want to. But now and then echoes—almost noises—make themselves heard in it. Sometimes I find I have listened in spite of myself.” She had always been rather grave about her little son and when her husband’s early death left him and his dignified but not large estate in her care she realized that there lay in her hands the power to direct a life as she chose, in as far as was humanly possible. The pure blood and healthy tendencies of a long and fine ancestry expressing themselves in the boy’s splendid body and unusual beauty had set the minds of two imaginative people working from the first. One of Muir’s deepest interests was the study of development of the race. It was he who had planted in her mind that daringly fearless thought of a human perfection as to the Intention of the Creative Cause. They used to look at the child as he lay asleep and note the beauty of him—his hands, his feet, his torso, the tint and texture and line of him. “This is what was _meant_—in the plan for every human being—How could there be scamping and inefficiency in Creation. It is we ourselves who have scamped and been incomplete in our thought and life. Here he is. Look at him. But he will only develop as he is—if living does not warp him.” This was what his father said. His mother was at her gravest as she looked down at the little god in the crib. “It’s as if some power had thrust a casket of loose jewels into our hands and said, ‘It is for you to see that not one is lost’,” she murmured. Then the looked up and smiled. “Are we being solemn—over a baby?” she said.