extravagance. Yet, even then, he had overruled them with an autocratic
assurance, which knew no doubt. It had not at first been easy for the
gentle mother, whose hands were red from decades of tub and dishpan, and
the father whose fingers had gripped the plow, to adapt themselves to
the idle and effortless régime of this new order.

It had for a long while been impossible for them to escape the fear of a
crash in which all this iridescent and artificial seeming must collapse.
But his attitude remained unaltered. "I do not mean to let money be my
master," he had obstinately reiterated. "To me it shall be a slave.
Money conquers the man who fears it. It is an insolent, inanimate
underling, which, if not treated with contempt, becomes a tyrant. Scorn
it and it serves you blindly. I must _seem_ a rich man before I can
become one. It is my wish that my family appear the family of a rich
man. Economies that are apparent are confessions of failure."

In the first chapters they protested, but Ham swept their protests
intolerantly aside, and as the years went on he piled miracle upon
miracle until every promise of his unsupported egotism had become an
accomplished and undeniable reality. Then they ceased to fear and
trusted implicitly in the star that led him. Gradually they yielded to
the blandishments of the new life and drifted pleasantly before the
breezes of luxury. The man who had been a bearded and Calvinistic
countryman for almost a half-century became in less than a decade an
ease-loving and slothful old gentleman, dapper of appearance, rosy of
face and inclining toward _embonpoint_.

Now it is fundamentally written in the edicts of Truth that a man must
go forward or back, and if his hands hang idle at his sides, he will not
advance. Thomas Standish Burton was born to buffet the storms of his