Page:The City of Masks (1918).djvu/200



R. SMITH-PARVIS, Senior, entertained one old-fashioned, back-number idea,—relict of a throttled past; it was a pestiferous idea that always kept bobbing up in an insistent, aggravating way the instant he realized that he had a few minutes to himself.

Psychologists might go so far as to claim that he had been born with it; that it was, after a fashion, hereditary. He had come of honest, hard-working Smiths; the men and women before him had cultivated the idea with such unwavering assiduity that, despite all that had conspired to stifle it, the thing still clung to him and would not be shaken off.

In short, Mr. Smith-Parvis had an idea that a man should work. Especially a young man.

In secret he squirmed over the fact that his son Stuyvesant had never been known to do a day's work in his life. Not that it was actually necessary for the young man to descend to anything so common and inelegant as earning his daily bread, or that there was even a remote prospect of the wolf sniffing around a future doorway. Not at all. He knew that Stuyvie didn't have to work. Still, it grieved him to see so much youthful energy going to waste. He had never quite gotten over the feeling that a man could make something besides a mere