Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/121

 raillery to his friends; the boys and girls fought their separate ways, gathering educational manna from every bush; and became practical hard-headed men and women of the world, with a keen eye to the main chance, a grip of the essentials of life, as befits the offspring of a dreamer.

Something of scorn for his failures, of contempt for his ideals, impatience with his shiftlessness, tinged their attitude to him always, and, spreading wider, their attitude towards every one who bore not the hall-mark of the world's estimate of success. What is the good of it, how much will it bring? was their standard of worth.

Barney who had become a successful stockbroker, occasionally found the former acquaintanceship of the old guv'nor with sundry families of noble breeding of signal service to him. He never failed to make capital of the "old Dad's" intimate knowledge of salmon-fishing, or the best places to go in search of big game and the easiest way to get there. "A fellow whose father is a crack shot and an authority on salmon-fishing can't be quite a cad, don't you know!" young De Vere would urge when asking his governor to send City Barney an invitation.

Barney, in return, paid for the Captain's cheap lodgings, and gave him a hint that the "missus" only cared to see people on invitation, as the chicks asked awkward questions before her folk as to why grandpa lived in such a little house? It didn't do! The Captain would curl his grey moustache fiercely and turn to his pipe and book, and lay the one as it burnt out as a marker in the half-read page of the other, and close his eyes with a vehemence of intention that boded ill for the performance, to map out the chapters of the wonderful book.

Dick, who had inherited his facile invention, astounding memory, and his adaptive mercurial temperament, without any of his tenderness of heart, had taken successfully to journalism as a stone