mountains, and as long as he followed his destiny he could look his
fellow-man in the face with the level eyes of independence. Within his
limitations, he could think wholesomely and soundly. But here he was a
different man, a Samson shorn, and the things which he had first
contemptuously waved aside or accepted with a growl in his throat, he
now welcomed. The hard brown face was rounded and pink and where there
had been rawhide muscles on his torso there was now soft and fatty
flesh; for Tom Burton whom men had accounted a giant of immovable
resolution back there among the forests was, in these days, a gentleman
and wore a gardenia or a carnation in his lapel. It was not originally
his fault. The process of becoming a gentleman had pained and irked him,
but he had a masterful son who could not afford that his father should
wear a shaggy bark, and that masterful son had been suffocating him with
opulence until his powers of resistance had become atrophied.

And the mother, too, had altered, though, in her, the change had been a
sweeter thing. The making of a lady of this remote descendant of
Alexander Hamilton's blood had not been difficult.

Some strains of heredity can awaken from the submerged sleep of relapse
as quickly and keenly as a woodsman throws off the mists of slumber.

Ham had never feared that his mother would reveal the taint of the
parvenue when she faced the batteries of criticism which guard the
outposts of the social world to which his own prominence gave the
entrée. And Paul, with his gentle love of comfort and his thoughts that
strayed into dreams and music, found the perfumed atmosphere of a
drawing-room very congenial. He breathed the incense of praise from
women who were enraptured as his long fingers stole over the piano keys.
Had his road to artistic recognition lain along the broken trail of