ried 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 faults, then
he would not seek them. Equally distasteful were those who equalled
him in wealth alone, for by a strange contradiction, the very fact that
the rumshop did not jar on their sensibilities, marked them for him as
coarse and uncongenial. Weston had turned to himself. It is the study
of oneself that makes cynics. The study of others makes egotists.
Then a woman had come. Of her Weston did not say much, except that she