"At the same time I have always kept a sort of watch over you. And if actual misfortune had overtaken you I would have found a way to come to your assistance. A little poverty and hard work will enable you to appreciate riches later.
"By this time you have learned that I was once your mother's suitor. She refused me for the first Jack Norman, your father. I wonder if your mother ever talked to you about me. Probably not. She was never a talker. Well, I hope you will never have such a blow as that was to me. I don't think you will. You have a certain grace (I have seen you), Phoebe's grace, that will endear you to your chosen maiden. As for me, even as a youth I was a dry stick.
"What made it harder for me was that I despised your father as a weaker man than myself. When I let this out to your mother in my anger and bitterness, she retorted that if he was less strong he was certainly more lovable.
"I left Cartonsville in my bitterness. My one idea, like so many galled young men before me, was to do something that would force Phoebe Farrow to acknowledge to herself that she had chosen the wrong man. I resolved to make myself a rich man, the richest in America. To gain this end I was prepared to deny myself everything above the barest necessities of life. Every cent was to be set to work to earn five.
"I succeeded, as every man must, who is bent on a thing so determinedly as I was. I did not return to Cartonsville for fifteen years. Fifteen years of slavery they were. Those were the years that formed me for life—deformed me I should say. I was already a rich man when I went back.
"I found the situation much as I had imagined it. Your mother was the hard-working wife of a poor man—a man destined to die poor. She lived in a small inconvenient house without any servant, and her pretty hands were red and rough. And I was a millionaire. You were five years old at that time and your parents' only child. Both your elder brothers had died in an epidemic.
"But my triumph did not come off as I had pictured. Phoebe pitied me.
"'No wife nor chick?' she said, with her rare soft smile. 'Poor Silas! How useless your wealth must seem to you!'
"Then I saw as in a great white light that I had only been a fool for my pains. I returned to New York and automatically resumed the business of making money. I could not stop. It was all I knew. It filled my days and kept me from thinking.
"I often wished to change my way of life, but it was too late then. I was already known as Silas Gyde the usurer, and men had hardened their hearts against me. My diffident attempts to make friends were rebuffed. I was forced back into the rut I had worn for myself. There was nothing for me to do but earn the reputation the world had given me.