the customary evening dinner was dispensed with when deacons were the guests. This was done out of deference to the inferior position of some of the younger deacons, who had not yet attained the social dignity of late dinners.

Masterman, however, took care that this substitutionary meal did credit to his own social superiority. Where the younger deacons were accustomed to provide for the entertainment of their brethren plates of exiguous ham, manifestly bought at the cookshop, insufficient salads frugally overlaid with sliced eggs, and a sparse variety of home-made cake and pastry, Masterman spread a groaning table with a cold sirloin of beef, a pair of fowls, and an entire ham, to say nothing of thick cream and expensive fruits. Masterman's coffee, too, was of a richness quite unapproachable by the inferior decoctions of Beverley and Luke, whose wives dealt at local shops, and were not above using a certain detestable invention known as coffee essence. Luke and Beverley also used gas fires in their dining- and drawing-rooms, to save labour, which was necessary when but one maid was kept; whereas Masterman had a coal fire even in the hall, and burned logs of wood in his living-rooms. Upon Masterman's table there was also real silver of undeniable price, and a vast silver urn; whereas Beverley and Luke could pretend to nothing better than electro imitations, which were not even silver-plated. So that it was clear that though Masterman gave high teas, they were scarcely distinguishable from evening dinners; and if he was a deacon, he was by no means a common deacon.

Arthur Masterman had long ago come to regard those diaconal high teas with a kind of sombre merriment. It amused him to remark his father's difficult adjustment to a form of meal to which he was not used; his conflict between condescension and hospitality; his manifest, and not quite successful, effort to modify his blunt, domineering outspokenness to the sensitive susceptibilities of his guests. He was aware also, with a sort of pride, how big his father seemed beside these men. He loomed above them like some vast cathedral front over huddled houses. They were city dwellers all, and had never been anything else. They had the precise, neat manners of men accustomed to formal ways of life. Their talk rarely went beyond the gossip of church affairs, or the recapitulation of something in the morning's paper. But no one could look at Archibold Masterman without a sense of something primitive and massive in the man. The heavy frame, the great breadth of shoulder, the clean-shaven face with its firm lines, the eyes, clear, watchful, dominating, with a certain almost vulpine intensity and hardness—all these declared a man at all times unusual, but most unusual in contrast with these men, who bore in every feature the evidence of how cities by mere attrition grind men down into conventional similarities. That the boy should fear his father was natural, for Archibold Masterman was a man whose will was law; that he should not wholly understand him was also natural, for a vast world of experience lay between them: but his pride in him was a genuine and steadfast feeling, all the more remarkable because the father was uneducated, and the son had drunk deep of the waters of Oxford scholarship.

With the sister, Helen, the case was very different. Arthur had inherited from his father the gift of self-poise. He knew how to look at things with a single eye, to meditate on them in silence, and to take up an attitude of his own toward them. Helen's whole nature was of lighter calibre. She was a girl easily influenced by chance acquaintance, more ready to enjoy life than to examine its underlying elements, in all things more comformable to conventions. When she came home from an expensive finishing-school, she brought with her less her own character than a character imposed upon her by her teachers. She took her place in life with an instant alacrity of adaptation; formed a dozen light-hearted friendships, became popular for her vivacity and gaiety, and in her heart thought her father dull. She had none of the sense of his essential bigness that Arthur had. She had no curiosity about him: he was simply an element in the convenient furniture of her own life. She sometimes wished him a little more polished, resented his brusque manners, misunderstood his heavy silence, and was inclined to be ironical about his social ambitions. Yet these same social ambitions were the chief common bond between them. Through them she saw her road to a life that would gratify her vanity. Somewhere, in the dim future, she discerned a golden world, which she hoped to enter when her father's force of character had broken down the barriers of social caste. What her father's character really was, or by what means he meant to reach that desirable golden world, she did not ask. As long as the result was reached, she had no curiosity about the process.

The last person in the family group to be remarked is the mother. She sat at the end of the long table, dispensing tea and coffee with an air of weary assiduity. In her youth she had had some claim to beauty, and there still clung to her a kind of tired elegance. Her hair, once blond, had become almost white, and lay in rippled fullness over a forehead much lined. Her face was without colour, the eyebrows dark and beautifully curved, the eyes gray and clear, with a certain startled expression, as if life had presented to her little else than a series of unforeseen surprises. She was a very silent woman; silence was her dominating quality, but it was enigmatic silence. Persons of effusive and flamboyant manners found her silence scarcely distinguishable from scorn; people of vivacious temperament called it stolidity; the general impression among her acquaintance was that it was significant of a nature at once cold and colourless. They were all wrong, however. And those were yet further from the truth who confused her silence with placidity. There were times when a sudden flash of fire in the gray, watchful eyes witnessed to an inner heat. If she spoke little, it was not because she felt little—it was rather because she realised the total ineffectiveness of language to express her thought. Helen had characteristically never tried to understand her mother. But as Arthur had grown older, and especially since his return from Oxford, he had often found himself speculating on the real nature of his mother's character. He saw her, an apparent automaton, content to fill an automatic place in life, making no claims for herself, offering no opposition to the claims of others, apparently desirous of squeezing herself into a position of neglected insignificance; but he was acute enough to know that all this self-effacement was artificial. What were her real relations with his father? Was she a woman simply overborne by his superior weight? How much of her silence sprang from fear of his heavy-handed judgments? But no sooner did such thoughts visit him than the boy recoiled from them with a sense of their indelicacy. Not to speculate at times upon the relations of his parents was impossible in one who was just at that stage of observation when the entire area of life is an object of intense curiosity; but to cherish or pursue such thoughts was too much like violating a privacy which both nature and custom had declared sacred. Yet of one thing he was sure: his mother's native force of character was not inferior to his father's, and her silence rested on a deep-lying intensity of temperament, not on apathy.

The meal pursued its common course of dullness. Luke retailed some petty gossip about a family named Vickars, who had recently joined the church; and Beverley contrived to get upon his usual topic of fiscal reform, producing as his own opinions the substance of a leading article which had appeared in the morning paper. No one took any notice of Beverley, but Luke's topic of conversation proved more interesting, especially to the only other deacon present, a middle-aged, slightly gray man, with quick, crafty eyes, called Scales. Scales kept the record