Rod had once said to himself that the family had become static. He had felt a regret for this grooved state; all the great adventuring done; all the great efforts and endurings and activities accomplished. Ease flowed about them in a wide stream. And Grove was the fine flower of it all--a comet flashing across the local heavens, with a tail of yachts, mistresses, vulgar display spreading luminously behind him. Grandfather Norquay sat in his chair by a sunny window or walked with his stick slowly about the grounds,--a tall, spare, silent old man, thinking his contained, regressive thoughts. Rod would look at him and wonder. He would look at Mary Thorn and wonder. He would look at Grove, when that kinetic gentleman marshaled his house parties down the _Kowloon's_ gangplank, and wonder. Then he would entrench in a library chair, fortified by cigarettes, and read the typed copy of his great-great-grandfather's journal, and his wonder,--which was no more than the vital curiosity of an inquiring mind--would turn from the general to the particular. He would lay down that hundred-year-old document, clasp his hands behind his head, and strive to construct imaginatively for himself a future based on the known factors of the present and the past. Strangely enough he always came out of these spells of day-dreaming with a sense of futility, with an envy of his forbears, with a regretful sense of having been born too late. Romance might still be a lusty godlet but he moved beyond Rod's ken. He would visualize old Roderick on the poop of the _Hermes_, pistol in belt, peering out from under a three-cornered hat, one eye on the beauty of a mountainous, thick-forested coast, the other keenly on pelts of sea otter and the profitable risks of barter with savages. Battles with the sea, with a hostile environment, a fine courage, and a far, future-piercing vision. Rod saw the log stockade ringed about by painted Chilcotins, arrows flying, muskets cracking; the battle fought and the dead buried; life continuing in armed watchfulness; the slow weaving of the planned pattern. "The old fellows had all this in mind," Rod murmured once. "Order and security and well-being. I wonder if they saw everything so firmly established that it has become rigid? That all the Norquays can do now is to live and die like gentlemen. I wonder if old Roderick would have been such a keen, far-sighted old blade if he could have seen the fifth generation as it is? Maybe he would regard us with pride. I wonder? Anyway, they had a whale of a time those days. The Trojans and Spartans had nothing on them. And there has been no Homer to write an Odyssey. No Iliad of the pioneers. The epic of fur and timber and the conquering of a wilderness peopled with savages. I wonder if I could?"