So does Helen's father.

And for three years our house has been a rendezvous for them.
We've prospered, but _that_ has been bitter fruit." Strong elemental passions Lane had seen and felt in people during the short twenty-four hours since his return home.

All of them had stung and astounded him, flung into his face the hard brutal facts of the materialism of the present.

Surely it was an abnormal condition.

And yet from the last quarter where he might have expected to find uplift, and the crystallizing of his attitude toward the world, and the sharpening of his intelligence--from the hard, grim mother of the girl who had jilted him, these had come.