When Sally was fifteen and he twenty-two, he had fallen in love with her
and she with him; and nothing had broken the early romance. He had
captured her young imagination, and had fastened his image on her heart.
Her people, seeing the drift of things, had sent her to a school on the
Hudson, and the two did not meet for some time. Then came a stolen
interview, and a fastening of the rivets of attraction--for Jim had gifts
of a wonderful kind. He knew his Horace and Anacreon and Heine and
Lamartine and Dante in the originals, and a hundred others; he was a
speaker of power and grace; and he had a clear, strong head for business.
He was also a lawyer, and was junior attorney to his father's great
business. It was because he had the real business gift, not because
he had a brilliant and scholarly mind, that his father had taken him
into his concerns, and was the more unforgiving when he gave way to
temptation. Otherwise, he would have pensioned Jim off, and dismissed
him from his mind as a useless, insignificant person; for Horace,
Anacreon, and philosophy and history were to him the recreations of the
feeble-minded.
Pages:
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89