Sprung from an aristocratic and thoroughly egoistic ancestry on his
father's side, and a morbidly sensitive one on his mother's; brought up
by his paternal grandmother, whose every thought had been centred upon
him as the only living descendant of her family; surrounded by servants
who were the slaves of his grandmother's and his own whims; not even his
experience in the Boston Latin School, chosen because his father,
grandfather, and great-grandfather had been educated there, had served
to widen much the horizon of his daily living, or to make him anything
like a typical American youth.

Now, during the last two or three months he had been put into wholly
changed conditions. An habitual visitor to this family into whose life
he had accidentally entered, he had been a daily witness of Mrs.
Douglas's self-forgetting love, which was by no means content with
ministering to the happiness of her own loved home ones, but continually
reached out to an ever widening circle, blessing whomever it touched. He
could not be unconscious that every act of Robert Sumner's busy life was
directed by the desire to give of himself to help others; that a high
ideal of beneficence, not gain, was always before him, and was that by
which he measured himself. The wealth, the position of both, served only
to make their lives more generous.

And he saw that the younger people of the household had caught the same
spirit. Malcom, Margery, Barbara, and Bettina forgot themselves in each
other, and were most generous in all their judgments. They esteemed
people according to that which they were in themselves, not according to
what they had, and shrank from nothing save meanness and selfishness.

As we have seen, he had been attracted in a wonderful way to Barbara
ever since he had first met her. Her beauty, her unconscious pride of