“Mother, you spoke about influence just now,” John said into the rather tense silence—Eben was standing back to them. He had lit a small cigar.—“It’s so much more powerful than we know, or have any idea of really. Sometimes I think every meeting between two human beings is a collision.”

“Especially where class—forgive my using a forbidden word—enters in,” Eben said to the window. “You could take everything for granted. I couldn’t take anything for granted. I felt crude, inept. I didn’t know how to dress.”

“As if that mattered.” Cornelius brushed this aside. “We all went around looking like tramps, as I remember.”

“Tramps in white flannels for tennis, tramps in good old riding trousers made by Brooks Brothers; even those round white sailor hats you wore—I could never manage to look like you, casual and elegant. Well, I was jealous, let’s face it—jealous and humiliated.”

“You had a chip on your shoulder,” Cornelius said. “But you never realized that I felt inferior, man—inferior. And Father certainly rubbed that in, I can tell you.”

“Grandfather seems to have been a rather inhuman person,” John said. “It’s a relief to say it now. I’m sorry, Dad. I know how you admired him.”

“He was all of a piece, hard but generous. He couldn’t help what he was.” And suddenly he sat up, all alight. “That’s what Jane said, bless her. She said Gordon Chapman was great because he was simple. ‘All of a piece,’ she said. She implied this was something a horse reacted well to.” And Cornelius chuckled. “People, on the other hand, bolt. My mother, if you remember, often did, by withdrawing with a headache—a headache that sometimes lasted for days.” Then he sighed. “My father humiliated me, Eben. That’s what you couldn’t know. But he also taught me a great deal. I suppose I might say that he taught me to be a man.”

“Whatever that means,” John put in.

“Not to complain, for one thing. To take it on the chin, as he used to say.”

“I suppose what he did for me was to challenge me—challenge me because I was bound to show him I could win at his game, be someone in the world,” Eben said. The anger had gone.

“Whereas Jane—oh, let us come back to her—challenged me to be myself,” John said, “really against the whole climate around here.”

“Gordon Chapman,” Eben said, “created enormous pressures in all those around him. Some of it was salutary—spurred the horses on, you know. But Jane—well, I must agree with you, John—Jane somehow took the pressure away so one could see oneself naked.”

“The difference, no doubt, between a great gentleman—for you’ll have to grant my father was that—and a saint,” Cornelius said.