The son, putting on a white glove, got back at it. "I was asking you about Benny." Again the old man shifted. "Hum! Well! Since you make a point of it. Yes. I'll send him to Newport." "You won't forget?" "I never forget," replied the old man, who, from that moment, forgot it utterly--until the following night when throttlingly it leaped at him. Even if he had remembered, it could only have delayed the course of events. Benny went the next day and, in going, merely accelerated a drama which perhaps was preordered. But now, from behind the recesses of the malachite stairway, a rascal appeared and approached and opened a bronze door, from which a young gentleman passed out and entered his car. It was dark then, darker than convenient. There are ways that are obscure. The martyr who discovered that virtue is its own reward, died unwept, unhonoured, unsung. History does not know him. Perhaps he was an editor. But he bequeathed a valid idea. As the car swam on, Monty Paliser was conscious of it. It would, he reflected, simplify matters very much if his father died immediately. He had no ill-feeling toward him, no good-feeling, no feeling whatever. For the property conveyed to him and otherwise bestowed, he had no gratitude. These gifts were in the nature of things. Gifts similar or cognate his father had received, as also had his grandfather, his great-grandfather and so on ab initio. They were possessions handed down and handed over for the greater glory of the House. He had therefore no gratitude for them. When the time came he would repeat the process and expect no gratitude either. Meanwhile though the gifts were adequate, there were more en route, so many that they would lift him within hailing distance of the richest men in the world. Though whether that were worth five minutes of perplexity, ten minutes of tears, a row and, possibly, your name in the papers, depended on the point of view. In considering it, he found himself--and very much to his disgust--rememorating a moral axiom: Great wealth is a great burden. The axiom was a favourite with his father, who had sickened him with it. But on its heels always there had trod a variant. "By Gad, sir, you can say what you like, it puts you in a position to tell anybody to go to hell." The variant had a lilt, a go, a flourish. To employ a vulgarism of the hour, it had the punch. It landed you and between the eyes. It required neither commentaries nor explanation. It was all there. It was tangible as a brickbat, self-evident as the sun. In admiring it, the young man philosophised stoically. Did he not have enough for that already? Yes, but later? Later might he not want to philosophise less stoically and more luxuriously? It was a problem. Meanwhile there was Cassy. He had no wish to lose her. Yet about him already was the shadow of the inevitable draft act. That was not a problem merely, it was a pit.