“You leave that to me,” his father had answered, brusquely.  “What you don’t know about business won’t help you any in giving advice.  You’re going into the diplomatic service.”

Unfortunately for the smooth execution of Stephen Sanford’s idea, the whole country at this moment happened to be agitated over the discovery that a member of the diplomatic corps at Washington had taken advantage of his official position to secure plans and information, which he had transmitted to a power unfriendly to America, but allied to the government which he represented.  The diplomat fled, ignominiously disgraced; but as far as Allen could judge from the comment he heard, his greatest sin was considered to be the breaking of the thirteenth commandment, “Thou shalt not be found out.”

All this prejudiced the boy unduly against diplomacy as a profession.  In his eyes the acts of this man were unsportsmanlike; and to Allen Sanford, who looked upon a “good sport” as the noblest work of God, this charge was the most serious in the category of crime.  But his expostulations and protests to his father were of no avail.  Stephen Sanford had made up his mind, and that was the end of it.  Until he met Alice, Allen had been more upset because his father still treated him as a child than on account of any serious opposition to plans which he himself had formed.  He had never yet focussed himself upon any one particular determination with sufficient strength to make his father’s objections other than an annoyance.  But now, assimilating a part of the girl’s enthusiasm, and strengthened by the instant admiration which Mr. Gorham commanded, he was determined to make a stand at this point, taking the head of the great Consolidated Companies as his model, and with lance in hand to charge the world just as he would have “bucked” the Yale line.  Even the undesired diplomatic position was apparently not forthcoming; now he would not only make an effort on his own account, but he would insist upon his right to do so.  He did not know that the real reason he had heard nothing from his father during these weeks was because the positions which had been offered thus far appeared to the older man too insignificant for his son to be able to accept with dignity.  As one of the Pennsylvania senators remarked, “Stephen Sanford evidently expects his son to go to the Court of St. James.”

With Allen in this mood, it was not surprising that the meeting between father and son, immediately after Stephen Sanford arrived in Washington, should have ended in a declaration of war.  During the interview Allen gave abundant evidence of his unfitness for anything which required diplomacy; and his father, surprised to find in the boy a will as unyielding as his own, and angered beyond expression by Allen’s opposition, lost all control over himself and stamped out of the house, leaving his son behind, cast out forever from his affection, protection, and support.