The residence of Mr. Peter Pett, the well-known financier, onRiverside Drive is one of the leading eyesores of that breezy andexpensive boulevard. As you pass by in your limousine, or whileenjoying ten cents worth of fresh air on top of a green omnibus,it jumps out and bites at you. Architects, confronted with it,reel and throw up their hands defensively, and even the layobserver has a sense of shock. The place resembles in almostequal proportions a cathedral, a suburban villa, a hotel and aChinese pagoda. Many of its windows are of stained glass, andabove the porch stand two terra-cotta lions, considerably morerepulsive even than the complacent animals which guard New York'sPublic Library. It is a house which is impossible to overlook:

　　and it was probably for this reason that Mrs. Pett insisted onher husband buying it, for she was a woman who liked to benoticed.

　　Through the rich interior of this mansion Mr. Pett, its nominalproprietor, was wandering like a lost spirit. The hour was aboutten of a fine Sunday morning, but the Sabbath calm which was uponthe house had not communicated itself to him. There was a look ofexasperation on his usually patient face, and a muttered oath,picked up no doubt on the godless Stock Exchange, escaped hislips.

　　"Darn it!"He was afflicted by a sense of the pathos of his position. It wasnot as if he demanded much from life. He asked but little herebelow. At that moment all that he wanted was a quiet spot wherehe might read his Sunday paper in solitary peace, and he couldnot find one. Intruders lurked behind every door. The place wascongested.

　　This sort of thing had been growing worse and worse ever sincehis marriage two years previously. There was a strong literaryvirus in Mrs. Pett's system. She not only wrote voluminouslyherself--the name Nesta Ford Pett is familiar to all lovers ofsensational fiction--but aimed at maintaining a salon. Starting,in pursuance of this aim, with a single specimen,--her nephew,Willie Partridge, who was working on a new explosive which wouldeventually revolutionise war--she had gradually added to hercollections, until now she gave shelter beneath her terra-cottaroof to no fewer than six young and unrecognised geniuses. Sixbrilliant youths, mostly novelists who had not yet started andpoets who were about to begin, cluttered up Mr. Pett's rooms onthis fair June morning, while he, clutching his Sunday paper,wandered about, finding, like the dove in Genesis, no rest. Itwas at such times that he was almost inclined to envy his wife'sfirst husband, a business friend of his named Elmer Ford, who hadperished suddenly of an apoplectic seizure: and the pity which hegenerally felt for the deceased tended to shift its focus.

　　Marriage had certainly complicated life for Mr. Pett, as itfrequently does for the man who waits fifty years before tryingit. In addition to the geniuses, Mrs. Pett had brought with herto her new home her only son, Ogden, a fourteen-year-old boy of asingularly unloveable type. Years of grown-up society and theabsence of anything approaching discipline had given him aprecocity on which the earnest efforts of a series of privatetutors had expended themselves in vain. They came, full ofoptimism and self-confidence, to retire after a brief interval,shattered by the boy's stodgy resistance to education in any formor shape. To Mr. Pett, never at his ease with boys, Ogden Fordwas a constant irritant. He disliked his stepson's personality,and he more than suspected him of stealing his cigarettes. Itwas an additional annoyance that he was fully aware of theimpossibility of ever catching him at it.