gh of a
Treadwell. When it comes to starving a woman in cold blood, my
conscience begins to balk. There's only one thing it would balk at more
violently, and that is starving my work. That's what Uncle Cyrus would
like--nothing better. By Jove! the way he looked when he had the nerve
to make that proposition! And I honestly believe he thought I was going
to agree to it. I honestly believe he was surprised when I stood out
against him. He's a downright idiot, that's what is the matter with him.
Why, it would be a crime, nothing less than a crime, for me to give up
and go hunting after freight orders. Any ninny can do that. James can do
that--but he couldn't see, he positively couldn't see that I'd be wasted
at it."

The vision of Cyrus had banished the vision of Virginia, and leaving the
window, Oliver began walking rapidly back and forth between the
washstand and the bare bedstead. The fire of his ambition, which
opposition had fanned into a blaze, had never burned more brightly in
his heart than it did at that instant. He felt capable not only of
renouncing Virginia, but of reforming the world. While he walked there,
he dedicated himself to art as exclusively as Cyrus had ever dedicated
himself to money--since Nature, who had made the individual, had been
powerless to eradicate this basic quality of the type. A Treadwell had
always stood for success, and success meant merely seeing but one thing
at a time and seeing that thing at every instant. It meant to Cyrus and
to James the thought of money as absolutely as it meant to Oliver the
thought of art. The way to it was the same, only the ideas that pointed
the way were different. To Cyrus and to James, indeed, as to all
Treadwells everywhere, the idea was hardly an idea at all, since it had
been crystallized by long usage into a fact. The word "success" (and
what was success except another name for the universal Treadwell
spirit?) invariably assumed the image of the dollar in the mind of
Cyrus, while to Oliver, since his thinking was less carefully
cooerdinated, it was without shape or symbol. Pacing the dusty floor,
with the pale moonlight brooding like a flock of white birds over the
garden, the young man would have defined the word as embracing all the
lofty aspirations in the human soul. It was the hour when youth scaled
the heights and wrested the divine fire from the heavens. At the moment
he was less an individual than the embodied age of two-and-twenty. He
was