for his part, did he give them much, indeed, any more? Was there, Lee
wondered, a deficiency in his sense of parenthood?

He knew men all of whose labor was for their children; they slaved to
have comfortable sums against their children's futures; they schemed
and talked, often fatuously, for and about their sons and, in lesser
degree, daughters. They were, in short, wholly absorbed, no more than
parents; at the advent of a family they lost individuality, ambition,
initiative; nature trapped them, blotted them out; it used them for its
great purpose and then cast them aside, just as corporations used men
for a single task and dropped them when their productiveness was over.

But he wasn't like that, it might well be unfortunately. His
personality, his peculiar needs, had survived marriage; the vague
longings of youth had not been entirely killed. They were still potent
and still nameless; they had refused to be gathered into a definition
as exact as ambition. Lee had moved to Gregory's bed, and was holding
one of the small warm hands, inattentive to the eager clamor of voices.
Perhaps his ambition had vanished when he had left the first plan of
his future for the more tangible second: there wasn't much in the
material industry of iron founding, nor in his present wider
activities, to satisfy the imagination.

Taking the place of that, he had an uncommon amount of energy,
vitality, a force of some kind or other. Whatever he undertook he
followed with a full vigorous sweep; he was successful in convincing a
large proportion of the people with whom he dealt that their ends were
the same as his; and here, as well, chance, fate, had been with Lee--no
one, practically, had lost through a belief in him.