Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/186

 confronted with the intricate inconsistencies of personal relations between people involved in the family quarrel, Ethel had consistently displayed what Bennet considered good sense.

Of course he had been aware since his boyhood that Ethel's father was at outs with his own father and with his grandfather; when he grew older, Bennet recognized that this estrangement was due to Philip Carew's squeamishness over something which he thought grandfather Cullen had done. Bennet himself had possessed enough energetic curiosity to ascertain that in his day grandfather must have—to employ Bennet's euphemism—"pulled his share of the rough stuff." But, most obviously, grandfather's day had passed; its evils, whatever they had been, were or ought to be interred, and certainly not dug up at this day to disturb the family's enjoyment of the great benefits which grandfather had won by what he had done, Bennet was finding his life altogether too easy and diverting not to be positively infuriated at finding Ethel trying to stir up excitement again when every one else was so conveniently "quieted down" about grandfather.

The private school on the north side, to which Bennet had been sent when a boy; the carefully chosen preparatory school in Connecticut, which he had next attended, and finally Yale had turned him out a well-mannered, well-appearing, physically vigorous and stubborn-willed young man, aware of many satisfactions in his life and disturbed by no consciousness of serious faults. He had not been graduated from Yale, having been only in his junior year when the American declaration of war called him, together with all the rest of the able-bodied boys of his class, into a military