leisure. He had been thirty, then, and quite done with adventuring.
Now he was thirty-five and--well, he supposed the war had left him
restless. Presently he would settle down. He would begin his great
book on the "Psychology of Primitive Peoples." Everything would be
as it had been before.

But in the meantime it insisted upon being somewhat different--hence
this feeling which was not all dissatisfaction with his present
absurd position. He was, he admitted it, a badly sold man. But did
it matter? What had he lost except money and self-esteem? The money
did not matter and he was sure that Aunt Caroline, at least, would
say that he could spare the self-esteem. Besides, he would recover
it in time. His opinion of himself as a man of perspicacity in
business had recovered from harder blows than this. There was that
affair of the South American mines, for instance,--but anybody may
be mistaken about South American mines. He had told Aunt Caroline
this. "It was," he told Aunt Caroline, "a financial accident. I do
not blame myself. My father, as you know, was a far-sighted man.
These aptitudes run in families." Aunt Caroline had said, "Humph!"

Nevertheless it was true that the elder Hamilton Spence, now
deceased, had been a far-sighted man. Benis had always cherished a
warm admiration for the commercial astuteness which he conceived
himself to have inherited. He would have been, he thought, exactly
like his father--if he had cared for the drudgery of business. So it
was a habit of his, when in a quandary, to consider what his parent
would have done and then to do likewise--an excellent rule if he had
ever succeeded in applying it properly. But there were always so
many intruding details. Take the present predicament, for instance.
He could scarcely picture his father in these precise circumstances.