“Well, it is quite absurd to go back to that as the beginning of Jasper Ewold’s feelings toward me; but one day young Wingfield felt that young Ewold was patronizing him.  We had a turn at fisticuffs which resulted in my favor.  Jasper was a proud boy, and he never quite forgave me.  In fact, he was not used to being crossed.  Learning was easy for him; he was good-looking; he had an attractive manner, and it seemed only his right that all doors should open when he knocked.  Soon after our battle he went away to school.  Not until we were well past thirty did our paths cross again.  He was something of a painter, but he really had had no set purpose in life except the pleasures of his intellectual diversions.  I will not say that he was wild, but at least he had lived in the abundant freedom of his opportunities.  He fell in love at the same time that I did with Alice Jamison.  You have seen your mother’s picture, but that gives you little idea of her beauty in girlhood.”

“I have always thought her beautiful!” Jack exclaimed spontaneously.

“Yes.  I am glad.  She always was beautiful to me; but I like best to think of her before she turned against me.  I like to think of her as she was in the days of our courtship.  Fortune favored me instead of Jasper Ewold.  I can well understand the blow it was to him, that she should take the storekeeper, the man without learning, the man without family, as people supposed then, when he thought that she belonged entirely to his world.  But his enmity thereafter I can only explain by his wounded pride; by a mortal defeat for one used to having his way, for one who had never known discipline.  Your mother and I were very happy for a time.  I thought that she loved me and had chosen me because I was a man of purpose, while Jasper Ewold was not.”

John Wingfield, Sr. spoke deliberately, measuring his thought before he put it into words, as if he were trying to set himself apart as one figure in a drama while he aimed to do exact justice to the others.

“It was soon after you were born that your mother’s attitude changed.  She was, as you know, supersensitive, and whatever her grievances were she kept them to herself.  My immersion in my affairs was such that I could not be as attentive to her as I ought to have been.  Sometimes I thought that the advertisement with our name in big letters in every morning paper might be offensive to her; again, that she missed in me the education I had had to forfeit in youth, and that my affection could hardly take its place.  I know that Jasper Ewold saw her occasionally, and in his impulse I know that he said things about me that were untrue.  But that I pass over.  In his place I, too, might have been bitter.