sung by the middle class, and where is it now in its might?"



CHAPTER XI

THE GREAT ADVENTURE


Mr. Wickson did not send for father. They met by chance on the
ferry-boat to San Francisco, so that the warning he gave father was not
premeditated. Had they not met accidentally, there would not have been
any warning. Not that the outcome would have been different, however.
Father came of stout old Mayflower* stock, and the blood was imperative
in him.

* One of the first ships that carried colonies to America,
after the discovery of the New World. Descendants of these
original colonists were for a while inordinately proud of
their genealogy; but in time the blood became so widely
diffused that it ran in the veins practically of all
Americans.

"Ernest was right," he told me, as soon as he had returned home. "Ernest
is a very remarkable young man, and I'd rather see you his wife than the
wife of Rockefeller himself or the King of England."

"What's the matter?" I asked in alarm.

"The Oligarchy is about to tread upon our faces--yours and mine. Wickson