I won't say anything more about it.
You're not coming down to Cincinnati soon, are you?"
"I don't expect to," replied Lester.
"If you do I'd like to have you come and stay with us.
Bring your wife.
We could talk over old times."
Lester smiled an enigmatic smile.
"I'll be glad to," he said, without emotion. But he remembered that in the days of Jennie it was different.
They would never have receded from their position regarding her.
"Well," he thought, "perhaps I can't blame them.
Let it go."
They talked on about other things.
Finally Lester remembered an appointment.
"I'll have to leave you soon," he said, looking at his watch.
"I ought to go, too," said Robert.
They rose.
"Well, anyhow," he added, as they walked toward the cloakroom, "we won't be absolute strangers in the future, will we?"
"Certainly not," said Lester.
"I'll see you from time to time."
They shook hands and separated amicably.
There was a sense of unsatisfied obligation and some remorse in Robert's mind as he saw his brother walking briskly away.
Lester was an able man.
Why was it that there was so much feeling between them—had been even before Jennie had appeared?
Then he remembered his old thoughts about "snaky deeds."
That was what his brother lacked, and that only. He was not crafty; not darkly cruel, hence.
"What a world!" he thought.
On his part Lester went away feeling a slight sense of opposition to, but also of sympathy for, his brother.
He was not so terribly bad—not different from other men.
Why criticize?
What would he have done if he had been in Robert's place?
Robert was getting along.
So was he.
He could see now how it all came about—why he had been made the victim, why his brother had been made the keeper of the great fortune.
"It's the way the world runs," he thought.
"What difference does it make?
I have enough to live on.
Why not let it go at that?"
CHAPTER LXI
The days of man under the old dispensation, or, rather, according to that supposedly biblical formula, which persists, are threescore years and ten.
It is so ingrained in the race-consciousness by mouth-to-mouth utterance that it seems the profoundest of truths.
As a matter of fact, man, even under his mortal illusion, is organically built to live five times the period of his maturity, and would do so if he but knew that it is spirit which endures, that age is an illusion, and that there is no death.
Yet the race-thought, gained from what dream of materialism we know not, persists, and the death of man under the mathematical formula so fearfully accepted is daily registered.
Lester was one of those who believed in this formula.
He was nearing sixty.
He thought he had, say, twenty years more at the utmost to live—perhaps not so long.
Well, he had lived comfortably.
He felt that he could not complain.
If death was coming, let it come. He was ready at any time.
No complaint or resistance would issue from him.
Life, in most of its aspects, was a silly show anyhow.