His Father's Son

I

AFTER his wife's death Mason Grew took the momentous step of selling
out his business and moving from Wingfield, Connecticut, to
Brooklyn.

For years he had secretly nursed the hope of such a change, but had
never dared to suggest it to Mrs. Grew, a woman of immutable habits.
Mr. Grew himself was attached to Wingfield, where he had grown up,
prospered, and become what the local press described as "prominent."
He was attached to his ugly brick house with sandstone trimmings and
a cast-iron area-railing neatly sanded to match; to the similar row
of houses across the street, the "trolley" wires forming a kind of
aerial pathway between, and the sprawling vista closed by the
steeple of the church which he and his wife had always attended, and
where their only child had been baptized.

It was hard to snap all these threads of association, visual and
sentimental; yet still harder, now that he was alone, to live so far
from his boy. Ronald Grew was practising law in New York, and there
was no more chance of returning to live at Wingfield than of a
river's flowing inland from the sea. Therefore to be near him his
father must move; and it was characteristic of Mr. Grew, and of the
situation generally, that the translation, when it took place, was
to Brooklyn, and not to New York.

"Why you bury yourself in that hole I can't think," had been
Ronald's comment; and Mr. Grew simply replied that rents were lower
in Brooklyn, and that he had heard of a house that would suit him.
In reality he had said to himself--being the only recipient of his
own confidences--that if he went to New York he might be on the
boy's mind; whereas, if he lived in Brooklyn, Ronald would always
have a good excuse for not popping over to see him every other day.
The sociological isolation of Brooklyn, combined with its
geographical nearness, presented in fact the precise conditions for
Mr. Grew's case. He wanted to be near enough to New York to go there
often, to feel under his feet the same pavement that Ronald trod, to
sit now and then in the same theatres, and find on his
breakfast-table the journals which, with increasing frequency,
inserted Ronald's name in the sacred bounds of the society column.
It had always been a trial to Mr. Grew to have to wait twenty-four
hours to read that "among those present was Mr. Ronald Grew." Now he
had it with his coffee, and left it on the breakfast-table to the
perusal of a "hired girl" cosmopolitan enough to do it justice. In
such ways Brooklyn attested the advantages of its propinquity to New
York, while remaining, as regards Ronald's duty to his father, as
remote and inaccessible as Wingfield.

It was not that Ronald