"Well," he demanded, striking his hands upon the

arms of his chair, "what do you think of it?"

For the life of me I could not help laughing again.

There was, in the first place, a delicious irony in the

fact that I should learn through him of my grandfather's

wishes with respect to myself. Pickering and

I had grown up in the same town in Vermont; we had

attended the same preparatory school, but there had

been from boyhood a certain antagonism between us.

He had always succeeded where I had failed, which is to

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say, I must admit, that he had succeeded pretty frequently.

When I refused to settle down to my profession,

but chose to see something of the world first,

Pickering gave himself seriously to the law, and there

was, I knew from the beginning, no manner of chance

that he would fail.

I am not more or less than human, and I remembered

with joy that once I had thrashed him soundly

at the prep school for bullying a smaller boy; but our

score from school-days was not without tallies on his

side. He was easily the better scholar-I grant him

that; and he was shrewd and plausible. You never

quite knew the extent of his powers and resources, and

he had, I always maintained, the most amazing good

luck,-as witness the fact that John Marshall Glenarm

had taken a friendly interest in him. It was wholly

like my grandfather, who was a man of many whims,

to give his affairs into Pickering's keeping; and I could

not complain, for I had missed my own chance with

him. It was, I knew readily enough, part of my punishment

for having succeeded so signally in incurring

my grandfather's displeasure that he had made it necessary

for me to treat with Arthur Pickering in this

matter of the will; and Pickering was enjoying the

situation to the full. He sank back in his chair with

an air of complacency that had always been insufferable

in him. I was quite willing to be patronized by a man

of years and experience; but Pickering was my own

age, and his experience of life seemed to me preposterously

inadequate. To find him settled in New York,

where he had been established through my grandfather's

generosity, and the executor of my grandfather's estate,

was hard to bear.

But there was something not wholly honest in my

mirth, for my conduct during the three preceding years

had been reprehensible. I had used my grandfather

shabbily. My parents died when I was a child, and he

had cared for me as far back as my memory ran. He

had suffered me to spend without restraint the fortune

left by my father; he had expected much of me, and I

had grievously disappointed him. It was his hope that

I should devote myself to architecture, a profession for

which he had the greatest admiration, whereas I had

insisted on engineering.




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