“You and Eugene Morgan and that rascally old Sheridan and your Jew friends are doing an awful thing,” he said to Dan at a family dinner. “You’re ruining the one decent thing the city possessed—a splendid, dignified old street. It’s happening all over the country—one doesn’t need half an hour in New York to see that Fifth Avenue is ruined; but I did think we might have escaped here. I doubt if it would ever have occurred to Morgan to put up his awful sales building—with a repair shop in it!—on National Avenue, if you hadn’t done it first. Then the others thought they had to follow; and if something isn’t done to stop you fellows, the whole avenue will be nothing but a mile row of motor-car sales buildings and pneumatic tire warehouses and garages—a market!—and with hundred-foot smoke-stacks! It may reach even here to our old house and the Shelbys’; and already you’ve made the peaceful neighbourhood around _my_ house horrible. I’d like to know what grandma Savage would have said about the things you people have done to this town! Why, you’ve made National Avenue begin to look like an old pipe-smoking hag’s mouth with every other tooth missing and the rest sticking up all black in the smoke.” Dan laughed absent-mindedly, but remained impervious. Like the ardent Sheridan, he loved the smoke, called it “Prosperity,” and drew his lungs full of it, breathing in it the glory of his city. More and more, the city became his city, and with all his juggling and tight-rope dancing he found time to be mayor of it for a year, and to begin the “Park System” that was afterwards to bring so much beauty to it. One day he drove his father over the ground he had planned to include in this chain of groves and meadows; and he was glad afterwards that they had made the excursion together. “It’ll be a great thing for the city,” his father said, as Dan’s car turned homeward with them. “It’s a great thing for you to do and to be remembered by. You were a good boy, Dan; and you’re a good man and a good citizen. You serve your fellow-men well, I think.” Dan laughed, a little embarrassed by this praise; but although Mr. Oliphant perceived his son’s embarrassment, he had more to say, and went on with something like timidity, yet with a gentle persistence: “I’d like to tell you another thing, Dan. It’s something your mother and I never felt we ought to talk about to you, but I believe I’ll mention it to you to-day. We—you see your mother and I have always thought there’s a danger sometimes in letting a person see that you sympathize with him, because it might make him feel that he’s unhappy, or in trouble, whereas, if you just leave him to himself he may go on cheerfully enough and never think about it. But I _would_ like to tell you—I’d like to say——” He paused, and Dan asked: “You’d like to say what, sir?” “Well—I’d like just to tell you that your mother and I think you’ve always been as kind as you could to Lena.”