The Lords of High Decision

Roger Craighill was an old citizen; it may be questioned whether he was not, by severe standards, the first citizen of Pittsburg. There were, to be sure, richer men, but his identification with the soberer past of the City of the Iron Heartbefore the Greater City had planted its guidons as far as now along the rivers and over the hillsgave indubitable value and dignity to his name. He was interested in many philanthropies and reforms, and he had just returned from Washington where he had attended a conference of the American Reform Federation, of which he was a prominent and influential member. Colonel Craighill, like his son, dressed with care and followed the fashion, and to-night in his evening clothes his daughter thought him unusually handsome and distinguished. He had kept his figure, and his fine colouring had prompted Mr. Richard Wingfield, the cynic of the Allequippa Club, to bestow upon him the soubriquet of Rosy Roger, a pleasantry for which Wingfield had been censured by the governors. But Colonel Craighill's fine height and his noble head with its crown of white hair, set him apart for admiration in any gathering. He walked a mile a day and otherwise safeguarded his health, which an eminent New York physician assured him once a year was perfect. Roger Craighill was by all tests the most eligible widower in western Pennsylvania, and gossip had striven for years to marry him to any one of a dozen women imaginably his equals. When the local possibilities were exhausted attention shifted to women of becoming age and social standing in other citiesNew York, Philadelphia, BaltimoreColonel Craighill's frequent absences from home lending faint colour of truth to these speculations. His daughter, Mrs. John McCandless Blair, had often discussed the matter with her brother, but without resentment, save occasionally when some woman known to them and distasteful or particularly unsuitable from their standpoint was suggested. It was indicative of the difference in character and temperament between brother and sister that Wayne was more captious in his criticisms of the presumptive candidates for their mother's place in the old home than his sister. When, shortly after Mrs. Craighill's death, Wayne's dissolute habits became a town scandal there were many who said that things would have gone differently if his mother had lived; that Mrs. Craighill had understood Wayne, but that his father was wholly out of sympathy with him.

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