“All the while her ambition was laying its plans.  It was that I should have the Wingfield store one day, myself.  Out of school hours I would range the other department stores.  You see, I had not only inherited my father’s face more strikingly than you had, but also his talents.  I spent the summer vacations of my fourteenth and fifteenth years in a store.  I won the attention of my superiors and promise of promotion.  I foresaw the day when I should so prove my ability that father would take me into his own store, and then, gradually, I would make my place, secure, while you were idling about Europe.  And in those days you were frail and I was vigorous.

“There was no mistaking that father’s sense of convention was the one thing that stood between him and my desire.  He feared the world’s opinion if the truth became known, and deep down in heart he could never get over the pride of having married into your mother’s family.  You had very good blood on the maternal side, as they say, while my mother had begun in the cloak department and was self-made, like father.  Again, I was so truly his son in every instinct that he may have been a little jealous of me.  Father does not like to think that any other man was ever quite as great as he is.  I confess that is the way I feel, too.  That is what life is, after all—­it is yourself.  Yes, I saw the store as mine—­surely mine, with time!”

Prather’s reins lay across the pommel of the saddle drawn taut by the drooping head of his horse, which was barely dragging one foot after another.  He gave Jack a glance of flashing resentment and then, in his first impulse of real emotion, made a fist of one hand and drove it angrily into the palm of the other before continuing.

“Then father went to Europe to bring you home.  He had decided for the son of convention, the son of blood!  Though self-made, he was for family as against talent.  Besides, it was a victory for him.  At last you were his.  After your return there was a scene between mother and him, a cool, bitter argument.  He defied her to play her last card.  He said that you knew the truth and that she could at best only make a row.  And he wanted us out of New York; the place for me was a new country.  He would make us a handsome allowance.  So my mother agreed to his terms and we went to the Pacific coast.  There I was to enter one of the colleges.  My mother wanted me to have a college education, you see.  The last meeting between father and me was very interesting, blade playing on blade.  He really hated to let me go, for by this time he knew how hopeless you were.  He embraced me and said that I would get on, anyway.  I told him that the only trouble was that while I was the real son, I had a mole on my cheek.