These old rumors and sayings about the Jacobs's family history were
running in Stephen's head this evening, as he stood listlessly leaning on
the gate, and looking down at the unsightly spot of bare earth still left
where the gate had so long stood pressed back against the fence.

"I wonder how long it'll take to get that old rut smooth and green like
the rest of the yard," he thought. Stephen White absolutely hated
ugliness. It did not merely irritate and depress him, as it does everybody
of fine fastidiousness: he hated not only the sight of it, he hated it
with a sort of unreasoning vindictiveness. If it were a picture, he wanted
to burn the picture, cut it, tear it, trample it under foot, get it off
the face of the earth immediately, at any cost or risk. It had no business
to exist: if nobody else would make way with it, he must. He often saw
places that he would have liked to devastate, to blot out of existence if
he could, just because they were barren and unsightly. Once, when he was a
very little child, he suddenly seized a book of his father's,--an old,
shabby, worn dictionary,--and flung it into the fire with uncontrollable
passion; and, on being asked why he did it, had nothing to say in
justification of his act, except this extraordinary statement: "It was an
ugly book; it hurt me. Ugly books ought to go in the fire." What the child
suffered, and, still more, what the man suffered from this hatred of
ugliness, no words could portray. Ever since he could remember, he had
been unhappy from the lack of the beautiful in the surroundings of his
daily life. His father had been poor; his mother had been an invalid; and
neither father nor mother had a trace of the artistic temperament. From
what long-forgotten ancestor in his plain, hard-working family had come
Stephen's passionate love of beauty, nobody knew. It was the despair of
his father, the torment of his mother. From childhood to boyhood, from
boyhood to manhood, he had felt himself needlessly hurt and perversely
misunderstood on this one point. But it had not soured him: it had only