My son Walter!
It certainly isn’t lack of shrewdness that unfits him to be head of the family. Why do the qualities we most admire in ourselves, and find most useful there, so often irritate and even disgust us in another?
I have not told him that he is already the principal heir under the terms of my will. He will work harder to please me so long as he thinks the prize still withheld—still to be earned. He does not know how firmly my mind is set against James. So he never loses an opportunity to clinch my purpose. One day last week, in presence of his sister Aurora, I was reproving him for one of his many shortcomings, and, to enforce my reproof, was warning him that such conduct did not advance him toward the place from which his brother had been deposed.
His upper lip always twitches when he is about to launch one of those bits of craftiness he thinks so profound. The longer I live, the deeper is my contempt for craft—it so rarely fails to tangle and strangle itself in its own unwieldy nets. After his lip had twitched awhile, he looked furtively at Aurora. I looked also, and saw that she was a partner in his scheme, whatever it was.
“Well!” said I, impatiently, “what is it? Speak out!”
“You spoke of the position James lost,” he forced himself to say; “there wasn’t any such place, was there, Aurora?”
“No,” she answered; “James was deceiving you right along.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
Aurora looked nervously at Walter, and he said: “James often used to talk to us about your plans, and he always said that he wouldn’t let you make him your principal heir. He said he would disregard your will and would just divide the money up, giving a third to mother and making all us children equal heirs with him.”
It is amazing how the most astute man will overlook the simplest and plainest dangers. In all my thinking and planning on the subject of founding a family. I had never once thought of the possibility of my will being voluntarily broken by its chief beneficiary.