ated people coupled it with shame and crime
and dishonor and broken trust.

As a boy I remember myself as a spoiled youngster who took the luxuries
of this world for granted. I attended an expensive and select private
school, idled my way through that somehow, and entered college, a
happy-go-lucky young fellow with money in my pocket. For two-thirds
of my Freshman year--which was all I experienced of University life--I
enjoyed myself as much as possible, and studied as little. Then came the
telegram. I remember the looks of the messenger who brought it, the cap
he wore, and the grin on his young Irish face when the fellow sitting
next me at the battered black oak table in the back room of Kelly's
asked him to have a beer. I remember the song we were singing, the crowd
of us, how it began again and then stopped short when the others saw the
look on my face. The telegram contained but four words: "Come home at
once." It was signed with the name of my father's lawyer.

I presume I shall never forget even the smallest incident of that night
journey in the train and the home-coming. The lawyer's meeting me at the
station in the early morning; his taking care that I should not see the
newspapers, and his breaking the news to me. Not of the illness or death
which I had feared and dreaded, but of something worse--disgrace. My
father was an embezzler, a thief. He had absconded, had run away, like
the coward he was, taking with him what was left of his stealings. The
banking house of which he had been the head was insolvent. The police
were on his track. And, worse and most disgraceful of all, he had not
fled alone. There was a woman with him, a woman whose escapades had
furnished the papers with sensations for years.

I had never been well acquainted with my father. We had never been
friends and companions, like other fathers and sons I knew. I remember
him as a harsh, red-faced man, whom, as a boy, I avoided as much as
possible. As I grew older I never went to him for advice; he was to me a
sort of walking pocket-book, and not much else. Mother has often told
me that she remembers him as something quite different, and I suppose it
must be true, otherwise she would not have married him; but to me he was
a source of supply coupled with a bad temper, that was all. That I was
not utterly impossible, that, going my own gait as I did, I was not a
complete young blackguard, I know now was due entirely to Mother. She
and I were as cl