These sensations were succeeded by plain, ordinary, common, uncultured, ancestorless anger.  Bonbright Foote VI retained enough personality, enough of his human self, to be able to become angry.  True, he did not do it as one of his molders would have done; he was still a Foote, even in passion.  It was a dignified, a cultured, a repressed passion ... but deep-seated and seething for an outlet, just the same.  What he felt might be compared distantly to what other men feel when they seize upon the paternal razor strop and apply it wholesomely to that portion of their son’s anatomy which tradition says is most likely to turn boys to virtue. ...  He wanted to compel Bonbright to make painful reparation to his ancestors.  He wanted to inflict punishment of some striking, uncommon, distressing sort. ...

His anger increased, and he became even more human.  With a trifle more haste than was usual, with the studied, cultured set of his lips less studied and cultured than ever they had been before, he strode to his son’s door.  Something was going to happen.  He was restraining himself, but something would happen now.  He felt it and feared it. ...  His rage must have an outlet.  Vaguely he felt that fire must be fought with fire—­and he all unaccustomed to handling that element.  But he would rise to the necessities. ...

He stepped into Bonbright’s room, keyed up to eruption, but he did not erupt.  Nobody was there to erupt at.  Bonbright was gone. ...

Mr. Foote went back to his desk and sat there nervously drumming on its top with his fingers.  He was not himself.  He had never been so disturbed before and did not know it was possible for him to be upset in this manner.  There had been other crises, other disagreeable happenings in his life, but he had met them calmly, dispassionately, with what he was pleased to call philosophy.  He had liked to fancy himself as ruled wholly by intellect and not at all by emotion.  And now emotion had caught him up as a tidal wave might catch up a strong swimmer, and tossed him hither and thither, blinded by its spray and helpless.

His one coherent thought was that something must be done about it.  At such a moment some fathers would have considered the advisability of casting their sons loose to shift for themselves as a punishment for too much independence and for outraging the laws requiring unquestioning respect for father from son.  This course did not even occur to Mr. Foote.  It was in the nature of things that it should not, for in his mind his son was a permanent structure, a sort of extension on the family house.  He was there.  Without him the family ended, the family business passed into the hands of strangers.  There would be no Bonbright Foote VIII who, in his turn, should become the father of Bonbright Foote IX, and so following.  No, he did not hold even tentatively the idea of disinheritance.