On the Stairs | Page 2

indifferent air; nor, at its most distended, will it push the pride of life too far. That has been done already in sufficing measure by many others. Let us ride here an even keel and keep well within rule and reason.
I am simply to tell you how, as the years moved on, John McComas climbed the stairs of life from the bottom to the top--or so, at least, he was commonly considered to have done; and how, through the same years, Raymond Prince passed slowly and reluctantly along the same stairs from top to bottom--or so his critics usually regarded his course. Nor without some color of justice, I presume that they will pass each other somewhere near the middle of my volume.
III
In 1873 James Prince was living in a small, choice residential district near the Lake. Its choiceness was great, but was not duly guarded. The very smallness of the neighborhood--a triumphant record of early fortunes--put it upon a precarious basis: there was all too slight a margin against encroachments. And, besides, the discovery came to be made, some years later, that it was upon the wrong side of the river altogether. But it held up well in 1873; and it continued to do so through the eighties. Perhaps it was not until the middle or later nineties that the real exodus began. Some of the early magnates had died; some had evaporated financially; others had come to perceive, either for themselves or through their children, that the road to social consideration now ran another way. In due course a congeries of bulky and grandiose edifices, built lavishly in the best taste of their own day, remained to stare vacantly at the infrequent passer-by, or to tremble before the imminent prospect of sinking to unworthy uses: odd, old-time megatheriums stranded ineptly in their mortgage-mud. But through the seventies the neighborhood held up its head and people came from far to see it.
James Prince lived in one of these houses; and, around the corner, old Jehiel Prince lingered on in another.
James was, of course, Raymond's father. Jehiel was his grandfather. Raymond, when we take him up, was at the age of thirteen. And Johnny McComas, if you care to know, was close on twelve.
Jehiel Prince was of remote New England origin, and had come West by way of York State. He had been born somewhere between Utica and Rochester. He put up his house on no basis of domestic sociability; it was designed as a sort of monument to his personal success. He had not left the East to be a failure, or to remain inconspicuous. His contractor--or his architect, if one had been employed--had imagined a heavy, square affair of dull-red brick, with brown-stone trimmings in heavy courses. Items: a high basement, an undecorated mansard in slate; a big, clumsy pair of doors, set in the middle of all, at the top of a heavily balustraded flight of brown-stone steps; one vast window on the right of the doors to light the "parlor," and another like it, on the left, to light the "library": a fa?ade reared before any allegiance to "periods," and in a style best denominated local or indigenous. Jehiel was called a capitalist and had a supplementary office in the high front basement; and here he was fretting by himself, off and on, in 1873; and here he continued to fret by himself, off and on, until 1880, when he fretted himself from earth. He was an unhappy man, with no essential mastery of life. His wife existed somewhere upstairs. They seldom spoke--indeed seldom met--unless papers to shift the units of a perplexed estate were up for consideration. Sometimes her relatives stole into the house to see her and hoped, with fearfulness, not to meet her husband in some passageway. He himself had plenty of relatives, by blood as well as by marriage; too many of these were rascals, and they kept him busy. The town, in the seventies, was at the adventurous, formative stage; almost everybody was leaving the gravel walks of Probity to take a short cut across the fair lawns of Success, and the social landscape was a good deal cut up and disfigured.
"Poor relations!"--such was Jehiel's brief, scornful rating of the less capable among these supernumeraries. A poor relation represented, to him, the lowest form of animal life.
And when the chicane and intrigue of the more clever among them roused his indignation he would exclaim: "They're putting me through the smut-machine!"--an ignominious, exasperating treatment which he refused to undergo without loud protests. These protests often reduced his wife to trembling and to tears. At such times she might hide an elder sister--one on the pursuit of some slight dole--in a small back bedroom, far from sight and hearing.
An ugly house, inhabited by