material rewards, and nature seemed, in this direction, to have seconded
her training. He was genuinely indifferent to money, and his enjoyment
of beauty was of that happy sort which does not generate the wish for
possession. As long as the inner eye had food for contemplation, he cared
very little for the deficiencies in his surroundings; or, it might rather
be said, he felt, in the sum-total of beauty about him, an ownership of
appreciation that left him free from the fret of personal desire. Mrs.
Peyton had cultivated to excess this disregard of material conditions; but
she now began to ask herself whether, in so doing, she had not laid too
great a strain on a temperament naturally exalted. In guarding against
other tendencies she had perhaps fostered in him too exclusively those
qualities which circumstances had brought to an unusual development in
herself. His enthusiasms and his disdains were alike too unqualified
for that happy mean of character which is the best defence against the
surprises of fortune. If she had taught him to set an exaggerated value on
ideal rewards, was not that but a shifting of the danger-point on which her
fears had always hung? She trembled sometimes to think how little love and
a lifelong vigilance had availed in the deflecting of inherited tendencies.

Her fears were in a measure confirmed by the first two years of their life
in New York, and the opening of his career as a professional architect.
Close on the easy triumphs of his studentships there came the chilling
reaction of public indifference. Dick, on his return from Paris, had formed
a partnership with an architect who had had several years of practical
training in a New York office; but the quiet and industrious Gill, though
he attracted to the new firm a few small jobs which overflowed from the
business of his former employer, was not able to infect the public with
his own faith in Peyton's talents, and it was trying to a genius who felt
himself capable of creating palaces to have to restrict his efforts to
the building of suburban cottages or the planning of cheap alterations in