“Well,” he remarked to relieve her, “anyway, there’s some catch in it.  My father said so.”

CHAPTER VI

Wilber Cowan went off to bed, only a little concerned by this new-found flaw in his ancestry.  He would have thought it more important could he have known that this same Cowan ancestry was under analysis at the Whipple New Place.

There the three existing male Whipples sat about a long, magazine-littered table in the library and smoked and thought and at long intervals favoured one another with fragmentary speech.  Gideon sat erect in his chair or stood before the fireplace, now banked with ferns; black-clad, tall and thin and straight in the comely pleasance of his sixty years, his face smoothly shaven, his cheekbones jutting above depressed cheeks that fell to his narrow, pointed chin, his blue eyes crackling far under the brow, high and narrow and shaded with ruffling gray hair, still plenteous.  His ordinary aspect was severe, almost saturnine; but he was wont to destroy this effect with his thin-lipped smile that broke winningly over small white teeth and surprisingly hinted an alert young man behind these flickering shadows of age.  When he sat he sat gracefully erect; when he stood to face the other two, or paced the length of the table, he stood straight or moved with supple joints.  He was smoking a cigar with fastidious relish, and seemed to commune more with it than with his son or his brother.  Beside Sharon Whipple his dress seemed foppish.

Sharon, the round, stout man, two years younger than Gideon, had the same blue eyes, but they looked from a face plump, florid, vivacious.  There was a hint of the choleric in his glance.  His hair had been lighter than Gideon’s, and though now not so plentiful, had grayed less noticeably.  His fairer skin was bedizened with freckles; and when with a blunt thumb he pushed up the outer ends of his heavy eye-brows or cocked the thumb at a speaker whose views he did not share, it could be seen that he was the most aggressive of the three men.  Sharon notoriously lost his temper.  Gideon had never been known to lose his.  Sharon smoked and lolled carelessly in a Morris chair, one short, stout arm laid along its side, the other carelessly wielding the cigar, heedless of falling ashes.  Beside the careful Gideon he looked rustic.

Harvey D., son of Gideon, worriedly paced the length of the room.  His eyes were large behind thick glasses.  He smoked a cigarette gingerly, not inhaling its smoke, but ridding himself of it in little puffs of distaste.  His brown beard was neatly trimmed, and above it shone his forehead, pale and beautifully modelled under the carefully parted, already thinning, hair that was arranged in something almost like ringlets on either side.  He was neat-faced.  Of the three men he carried the Whipple nose most gracefully.  His figure was slight, not so tall as his father’s, and he was garbed in a more dapper fashion.  He wore an expertly fitted frock coat of black, gray trousers faintly striped, a pearl-gray cravat skewered by a pear-headed pin, and his small feet were incased in shoes of patent leather.  He was arrayed as befitted a Whipple who had become a banker.