Tales of Men and Ghosts

entous step of selling out his business and mo

nd become what the local press described as "prominent." He was attached to his ugly brick house with sandstone trimmings and a cast-iron area-railing neatly sanded to match; to the similar row of houses across the s

actising law in New York, and there was no more chance of returning to live at Wingfield than of a river's flowing inland from the sea. Therefore to be near him his f

other day. The sociological isolation of Brooklyn, combined with its geographical nearness, presented in fact the precise conditions for Mr. Grew's case. He wanted to be near enough to New York to go there often, to feel under his feet the same pavement that Ronald trod, to sit now and then in the same theatres, and find on his breakfast-table the journals which, with increasing frequency, inserted Ronald's name in the sacred bounds of the societ

nse of them, that Mr. Grew so persistently sought to minimize and lighten them. It was he

suppose? Gold plate and orchids - opera singers in afterward? Well, you'd be in a nice box if there was a fog on the river, and you got hung up half-way over. That'd be a handsome return for the attention Mrs. Bankshire has shown you - singling out a whipper-snapper like you twice in three weeks! (What's the daughter's name - Daisy?) No, sir - don't you come fooling round here next Sunday, or I'll set the do

s customary sweetness and tact (as Mr. Grew put it) he began to "take th

haven't sent Maria out for the evening. And I don't want the neighbors to see me opening my own door to my son. That's the kind of cringing snob I am. Don't give me away, will you? I want 'em to think

ably more acute than his son suspected. The souls of short thick-set men, with chubby features, mutton-chop whiskers, and pale eyes peering between folds of fat like almond kernels in half-split shells - souls thus encased do not reveal themselves to th

tal influences. At any rate, if the young man owed his beauty, his distinction and his winning manner to the dreams of one of his parents, it was certainly to those of Mr. Grew, who, while outwardly devoting his life to the manufacture and dissemination of Grew's Secure Suspender Buckle, moved in an enchanted inward world peopled with all the figures of romance. In this high company Mr. Grew cut as brilliant a figure as any of its nobl

ies, and yet holding his own in the fashionable sporting set that formed, as it were, the gateway of the temple of Society. Mr. Grew's idealism did not preclude the frank desire that his son should pass through that gateway; but the wish was not prompted by material considerations. It was Mr. Grew's notion that, in the rough and hurrying current of a new civilization, the little pools of leisure and enjoyment m

he actual Grew had passed from the factory to the bookkeeper's desk, his invisible double had been reading law at Columbia - precisely again what Ronald did! But it was when the young man left the paths laid out for him by the parental hand, and cast himself boldly on the world, that his adventures began to bear the most astonishing resemblance to those of the unrealized Mason Grew. It was in New York that the scene of this hypothetical being's first exploits had always been laid; and it was in New York that Ronald was to achieve his first triumph. There was nothing small or timid about Mr. Grew's imagination; it had never stopped at anything between Wingfield and the metropolis. And the real Ronald had the same cosmic vision as his parent. He brushed aside with a contemptuous laugh his mother's tearful entreaty that he should stay at Wingfield and cont

s;" and when Mr. Grew heard the epithet he understood in a flash that the Buckle was a thing to blush for. It was too late then to dissociate his name from it, or to efface from the hoardings of the entire continent the picture of two gentlemen, one contorting himself in the abject effort to repai

ke right hold in New York. Ronald's got my knack

in business," objected Mrs. G

omic face in its rim of sandy whiskers. "That's not the only way," he

ave written beautifully," sh

!" Mr. Grew b

weren't they beautif

ve and amused on the wife's part, and charged wi

the office now," he merely said, drag

nder a life-size theological virtue of her own choosing, and Mr. Grew's prognostications as to Ronald's