"Dear," he said. "Oh, Gloria, darling. It isn't true. I invented
it--every word of it."
But she would not believe him. There had been something in the details
he had chosen to describe that made her cry herself asleep that night,
for the kitten, for Anthony for herself, for the pain and bitterness and
cruelty of all the world.
THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MORALIST
Old Adam died on a midnight of late November with a pious compliment to
his God on his thin lips. He, who had been flattered so much, faded out
flattering the Omnipotent Abstraction which he fancied he might have
angered in the more lascivious moments of his youth. It was announced
that he had arranged some sort of an armistice with the deity, the terms
of which were not made public, though they were thought to have included
a large cash payment. All the newspapers printed his biography, and two
of them ran short editorials on his sterling worth, and his part in the
drama of industrialism, with which he had grown up. They referred
guardedly to the reforms he had sponsored and financed. The memories of
Comstock and Cato the Censor were resuscitated and paraded like gaunt
ghosts through the columns.
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