“But Tim is the most serious person that ever was,” returned Weston.  “I have found that out.  Once he makes up his mind, there is no changing it.  He is full of ideas.  He actually thinks that a man who is in business is doing something praiseworthy; that a man who has bought and sold merchandise at a profit all his life can fold his hands when he dies and say; ‘I have not lived in vain.’  He does not know yet that the larger estate a man leaves to his relatives the more useful his life has been.  Now I suppose he hopes some day to be a tea-king.  Perhaps he will.  I hope so.  I don’t want the job.  But once he has picked out his queen, you can’t change him by making marriage a financial impossibility.”

“Well, I’m certainly not protesting against your raising his salary,” said I.

“You needn’t.  To tell the truth, it’s too late.  I wrote to the office about that yesterday.”

It was of no use to thank Weston for anything.  I tried to, but he brushed it aside airily and told me to attend to my own affairs and light one of his cigars.  When we were smoking together, his mood became more serious, and as he spoke of Tim and Tim’s ambition, and of his interest in the boy, he was carried back to his own earlier life.  So for the first time I came to understand his prolonged stay in the valley.

Like Elmer Spiker, in my heart Weston’s conduct puzzled me.  When he told me that he had come here simply because he liked the country I believed him that far, but I suspected some deeper reason to keep a man of his stamp dawdling in a remote valley.  Now it was so simple.  The foundation of Weston’s fortunes had been laid in one small saloon; its bulk had been built on a chain stretching from end to end of the city.  Its founder had been a coarse, uneducated man, but his success in the liquor trade had been too great to be forgotten, even years after he had abandoned it and built up the great commercial house that bore his name.  His ambition for his son had been boundless.  He had spared nothing to make him a better man in the world’s eye than his father.  He had succeeded.  But the world had persisted in remembering the parental bar.  Robert Weston had never seen that bar, for he had entered on the scene when there was a chain of them, and his father had brought him up almost in ignorance of their very existence.  Even at the university he had little reason to be ashamed of them.  It was after he had spent years in rounding out his education abroad, and had returned to take his place in those circles which he believed he was entitled to enter, that he found that the world persisted in pointing to the large revenue stamp that seemed to cling to him.  A stronger man would have fought against odds like those and won for himself a place that would suffer no denial.  But Weston was physically a delicate man.  By nature he was retiring, rather than aggressive.  If those who were his equals would have none of him because of his father’s