There may be concealed somewhere a few rare human beings who can look back upon their treatment of their parents with honest satisfaction. I have never met any. It is the fate of those who bring others into the world to be chided for their manners, abused for their mistakes, and pilloried for their faults. Twenty years difference in age turns many an elegance into a barbarism; many a virtue into a vice-versa. I do not perform at breakfast for the edification of my offspring upon the mustache cup, but I chew my strawberry seeds, which they claim is worse. My grandpapa and grandmama used to pour the coffee from their cups and drink it from their saucers and they were--nevertheless--rated AA1 in Boston's Back Bay Blue Book. And now my daughters, who smoke cigarettes, object loudly to my pipe smoke! _Autre temps autres manières_. And no man is a hero to his children. He has a hanged-sight more chance with his valet--if in these days he can afford to keep one.
His father's death was a shock to Payson, Jr., because he had not supposed that people in active business like that ever did die,--they "retired" instead, and after a discreet period of semi-seclusion gradually disintegrated by appropriate stages. But Payson, Sr., simply died right in the middle of everything--without any chance of a spiritual understanding--"reconciliation" would be inaccurate--with his son. So, Payson, Jr., protestingly acquired by part cash and balance credit a complete suit of what he scathingly described as "the barbarous panoply of death" and, turning himself into what he similarly called a "human catafalque," followed Payson, Sr., to the grave.
Perhaps, after all, we have been a bit hard on Payson, Jr. He was fundamentally, as his father had perceived, good stuff, and wanted to do the right thing. But what is the right thing? Really it isn't half as hard to be good as to know how.
As the orphaned Payson, ensconced in lonely state in one of the funeral hacks, was carried at a fast trot down Broadway towards the offices of Tutt & Tutt, he consoled himself for his loss with the reflection that this was, probably, the last time he would ever have to see any of his relatives. Never in his short life had he been face to face with such a gathering of unattractive human beings. He hadn't imagined that such people existed. They oughtn't to exist. The earth should be a lovely place, its real estate occupied only by cultured and lovely people. These aesthetic considerations reminded him with a shock that, just as he had been an utter stranger to them, so he had been a stranger to his father--his poor, old, widowed father. What did he really know about him?--not one thing! And he had never tried to find out anything about him,--about his friends, his thoughts, his manner of life,--content merely to cash his checks, under the unconscious assumption that the man who drew them ought to be equally content to be the father of such a youth as himself. But those rusty relatives! They must have been his father's! Certainly his mother's wouldn't have been like that,--and he felt confident he took after his mother. Still, those relatives worried him! Up at Harvard he had stood rather grandly on his name--"Payson Clifford, Jr.,"--with no questions asked about the "Senior" or anybody else. He now perceived that he was to be thrown out into the world of fact where who and what his father had been might make a lot of difference. Rather anxiously he hoped the old gentleman would turn out to have been all right;--and would have left enough of an estate so that he could still go on cashing checks upon the first day of every month!