untry clergyman, to whom working his
way through college in order to practise a profession made no appeal.
Birth and boyhood in poverty had taught him, from want of money, the
power of money. He sought the centre of the market-place. At sixteen he
was a clerk, marked by his industry not less than by his engaging
manners, on six dollars a week in the little store that was the site of
his present triumph. Of course he became a partner and then owner. It was
his frequent remark, when he turned reminiscent, that if he could only
get as good clerks as he was in his day he would soon have a monopoly of
supplying New York and its environs with all it ate and wore and needed
to furnish its houses; which raises the point that possibly such an
equality of high standards in efficiency might make all clerks employers.

The steady flame of his egoism was fanned with his Successes. Without
real intimates or friends, he had an effective magnetism in making others
do his bidding. It had hardly occurred to him that his discovery of the
principle of never doing anything yourself that you can win others to do
for you and never failing, when you have a minute to spare, to do a thing
yourself when you can do it better than any assistant, was already a
practice with leaders in trade and industry before the Pharaohs.

Life had been to him a ladder which he ascended without any glances to
right or left or at the rung that he had left behind. The adaptable
processes of his mind kept pace with his rise. He made himself at home
in each higher stratum of atmosphere. His marriage, delayed until he was
forty and already a man of power, was still another upward step. Alice
Jamison brought him capital and position. The world was puzzled why she
should have accepted him; but this stroke of success he now considered as
the vital error of a career which, otherwise, had been flawlessly
planned. Yet he could flatter his egoism with the thought that it was
less a fault of judgment than of the uncertainty of feminine temperament,
which could not be measured by logic.

New York saw little of Mrs. Wingfield after Jack's birth. Her friends
knew her as a creature all life and light before her marriage; they
realized that the life and light had passed out of her soon after the boy
came; and thenceforth they saw and heard little of her. She had given
herself up to the insistent possessorship and company of her son. Those
who met her when travelling reported how f