If it be doubted that a Fred Cornplow would evolve a philosophy, it may be answered that the Fred Cornplows are great men, but most of them do not have the disastrous good fortune of sitting for many quiet hours beside a heartsick son, after having for five months sat, ineffectual and alone, by café tables in strange lands, and do not, thus, often ask: what is a Fred Cornplow that he too should live, along with such divine creatures as the humming-bird and the shark?

He perceived that his purpose in life had not been, as usually he had believed, to sell motor cars or handy household gadgets. Yet such selling was not, as the professors and communists would have it, trivial. It had demanded diplomacy, patience, ingenuity, faith that cars are worth having.

He worked away, also, at another notion:

Howard had been reared to demand, not that he be permitted to train his eyes and memory and chest muscles, but that he have, without passionate struggle, all the material richness of a medieval emperor: a palace small but luxuriously heated, a chariot which could gallop at eighty miles an hour, a magic device whereby he could talk to fellow potentates five thousand miles away.

Could he teach himself, then teach Howard, a vision of self-mastery?

Fred came out of his dreaming with a dismaying snap.

‘Can any father do much of anything — that is, permanently — for any son? Golly! Not even sure I can make him see he’s got to start at the bottom and build, because if I did have the gift of gab, like Doc Janissary, when I got all through my lecture, Howard would say, “Sure, I get you, but fellow has to show some class and be up to date, these days, hasn’t he?” But anyway, even if I can’t actually help him much, maybe by trying to I can keep my own doggone self from withering too much.’

What, definitely, ought he to do with Howard till the boy was ready to run on his own feet?

The normal thing, free of all fancy romantic ideas, would be to start him off in the Triumph agency again. But a new world would for a little while, suggest new thoughts. In strange lands, Fred hoped he himself had at least learned to be alone and lonely without whimpering.

Take Howard with him to Europe? No; let Annabel rest there. And it looked now, in all the news from Russia, Spain, Germany, Italy, as though the wise old nations of Europe that so despised America’s rawness were going to devote their ten thousand years of culture to butchering one another again.

He thought of the Whitefall River, in Canada, where he had once gone fishing. Even if it did nothing to turn Howard from an easy-going young gentleman into a stalwart hero, so dependable that he might some day become assistant to the assistant to the first vice-president of a chewing-gum factory, at least the sweating on the hot trail through the pines, the cold searing plunge afterward, and the chill still nights would in themselves be glorious living.