... absurd and dazzling fortune was succeeded by appalling and
irretrievable failure. Starratt, senior, was too young a man to
succumb to the scurvy trick of fate, but he never quite recovered.
Gradually the Starratt family fell back a pace. To the last there were
certain of the old guard who still remembered them with bits of
coveted pasteboard for receptions or marriages or anniversary
celebrations ... but the Starratts became more and more a memory
revived by sentiment and less and less a vital reality.

Fred Starratt used to speculate, during his nocturnal wandering among
the shadows of his parents' youthful haunts, just what his position
would have been had these stock-market tips proved gilt edged. He
tried to imagine himself the master of a splendid estate down the
peninsula--preferably at Hillsboro--possessed of high-power cars and a
string of polo ponies ... perhaps even a steam yacht... But these
dazzling visions were not always in the ascendant. There were times
when a philanthropic dream moved him more completely and he had naïve
and varied speculations concerning the help that he could have placed
in the way of the less fortunate had he been possessed of unlimited
means. Or, again, his hypothetical wealth put him in the way of the
education that placed him easily at the top of a stirring profession.

"If I'd only had half a chance!" would escape him.

This was a phrase borrowed unconsciously from his mother. She was
never bitter nor resentful at their profitless tilt with fortune
except as it had reacted on her son.

"You should have gone to college," she used to insist, regretfully,
summing up by implication his lack of advancement. At first he took a