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mountain.
    â€˜Mr. York,’ said Tom Archer, at sea level, ‘I should never have spoken to you as I did, and it won’t happen again. As for leaving you, I’d rather stay on.’
    â€˜Indeed? Yes. Well.’ Robert York’s museum features hardly reflected the gratification he felt; but his hand, as if by its own volition, folded another two tissues and brought them to his nose for another sharp, brief blow.
    Touched, Tom Archer said gently, ‘Shall we get on with the mail?’
    â€˜The mail. Oh, yes.’ The eldest York removed his unrimmed glasses, whisked a Sight Saver from his top drawer, polished both lenses, restored the glasses to his eyes, dropped the Sight Saver and the four used tissues in his wastebasket, picked up the envelope on top of the heap, turned it over, put it down. ‘Mr. Archer — I don’t quite know how to say this — would you sit down?’
    Archer looked surprised and sat down in a facing chair. Robert York brought his cupped hand to his mouth and coughed delicately twice. Then he leaned back in his swivel chair and surveyed his ceiling with intensity, as if searching for something.
    â€˜As you perhaps know,’ he began, ‘I at all times prefer to avoid the, ah — the emotional approach to things. I have never understood emotions very well. I like things to, ah — come out even. I mean to say, right-wrong, good-bad, yes-no. That sort of thing. Can you understand that?’
    Tom Archer, heroically suppressing a quotation from Hegel which sprang to his lips, said instead, ‘Yes, indeed.’
    â€˜I lost my temper with you over the Salvadors,’ Robert York went on, heroically also, ‘for the curious reason, I think, that I had had some words with my cousin Percival earlier in the day. It must be that the, ah — vessel of one’s emotions has a limited capacity, that it fills up stealthily, as it were, and then — a few insignificant drops more, and it overflows. Is that possible, Mr. Archer?’
    â€˜It’s not only possible,’ Mr. Archer assured him, ‘it unfortunately happens all the time.’
    â€˜Yet it rather relieves me. Yes, it relieves me. You see, my cousin —’ His precise voice became less precise, blurred, then faded away as in a bad overseas connection.
    After a moment Tom Archer stirred. ‘Maybe, Mr. York, you really don’t want to talk about it.’
    York started. ‘I beg your pardon?’ Archer said it again. ‘Oh, but I do, Archer, I think I do. And now I feel that I may. That is, I find myself trustful of you after — well, you know what I mean.’
    â€˜I believe so, sir.’
    â€˜At any rate, my cousin asked me for money. Demanded it, really. I refused. To refuse a loan to a blood-relative who is coming into several million dollars shortly must strike you as very strange, Archer; but I felt that I must. As a matter of principle. My distaste for Percival’s squandering and dissolute ways was quite secondary.
    â€˜You see,’ Robert York continued at a faster, warmer pace, ‘I have always deemed it my duty to carry out the spirit as well as the letter of Nathaniel York, Senior’s, will, and I have more or less assumed the burden of seeing that my cousins do likewise. Uncle Nathaniel’s bequests to us were contingent upon our living in the four houses for a specified number of years, and I have confidently interpreted this — recalling our uncle’s impeccable life and his pride in the family traditions — as far more than a mere matter of residence. As I have repeatedly told Percival — the latest occasion, in fact, was the other day — a York occupying a York house in York Square assumes the moral obligations and perhaps even the legal obligation to do so with honor and propriety. I went so far this last time as to suggest to Percival that I might have to take the matter up with the courts, that