was no less ambitious for the advancement of his children.
They were quiet, unpretentious people, religious,
after the fashion of that time, and of sterling morality,
and they taught their children the simple virtues
of the Old Testament and Poor Richard's Almanac."

Bartley could not deny himself this gibe; but he trusted
to Lapham's unliterary habit of mind for his security
in making it, and most other people would consider it
sincere reporter's rhetoric.

"You know," he explained to Lapham, "that we have to look
at all these facts as material, and we get the habit
of classifying them. Sometimes a leading question will
draw out a whole line of facts that a man himself would
never think of." He went on to put several queries,
and it was from Lapham's answers that he generalised the
history of his childhood. "Mr. Lapham, although he did
not dwell on his boyish trials and struggles, spoke of them
with deep feeling and an abiding sense of their reality."
This was what he added in the interview, and by the time
he had got Lapham past the period where risen Americans
are all pathetically alike in their narrow circumstances,
their sufferings, and their aspirations, he had beguiled him
into forgetfulness of the check he had received, and had
him talking again in perfect enjoyment of his autobiography.

"Yes, sir," said Lapham, in a strain which Bartley was
careful not to interrupt again, "a man never sees all
that his mother has been to him till it's too late to let