couldn't for the life of him understand this treachery on the part of
his pampered offspring, on whom he had lavished everything and to whom
he had denied nothing in the way of luxury. It was hard for him to
realise that he was as much of a scamp and scapegrace in their young
eyes as he was in the eyes of his wife--and the whole of his wife's
family, even to the remotest of cousins.

In the bright days of their early married life, before he knew the
difference between what he looked upon as affectionate teasing and
what he afterwards came to know as persistent nagging, he deeded over
to her the house and lot in Madison Avenue. He did that willingly,
cheerfully. Two days after the divorce was granted, he paid over to
her one hundred thousand dollars alimony. He did that unwillingly,
gloomily. And the very next week the stock market went the wrong way
for him, and he was cleaned out. He hadn't a dollar left of the
comfortable little fortune that had been his. He remained drunk for
nearly two months, and when he sobered up in a sanitarium--and took
the pledge for the first and last time--he came out of the haze and
found that he hadn't a friend left in New York. Every man's head was
turned away from him, every man's hand was against him.

He sent for his son to come to the cheap hotel in which he was living.
The son sent back word that he never wanted to see his face again.
Whereupon Joseph Hooper for the first time declared that the sons and
daughters of men are curses, and slunk out of New York to say it aloud
in the broad, free stretches of the world across which he drifted
without aim or purpose for years and years and always farther away
from the home he had lost.

He always said to himself--but never so much as a word of it to any