And the return of the wanderer was set forth with graphic directness.
At noon the merchant and Henry ate luncheon in a club where thick rugs hushed a foot-fall into a mere whisper of a walk, where servants, grave of countenance and low of voice, seemed to underscore the chilliness of the place.

Henry was introduced to a number of astonished men, who said that they welcomed him home, and who immediately began to talk about something else; and he was shown through the large library, where a solitary man sat looking at the pictures in a comic weekly.

After leaving the club they went to a tailor's shop, and then drove over the boulevards and through the parks.

Witherspoon, with no pronounced degree of pride, had conducted Henry through the Colossus; he had been pleased, of course, at the young man's astonishment, and he must have been moved by a strong surge of self-glorification when his son wondered at the broadness of the Witherspoon empire, yet he had held in a strong subjection all signs of an unseemly pride.

But when he struck the boulevard system, his dignified reserve went to pieces.
"Finest on earth; no doubt about that.