When I was a boy at home, my mother had taken literally the Scriptural
injunction to pray in secret--in a closet, I think the passage of the Bible
said. Many times each day she used to retire to a closet under the stairway
and spend from one to twenty minutes shut in there. But we had no family
prayers. I was therefore deeply interested in what was going on in those
countrified parlors of one of the richest and most powerful men in the
world--and this right in the heart of that district of New York where
palaces stand in rows and in blocks, and where such few churches as there
are resemble social clubs for snubbing climbers and patronizing the poor.
It was astonishing how much every Roebuck in that circle, even the old
lady, looked like Roebuck himself--the same smug piety, the same underfed
appearance that, by the way, more often indicates a starved soul than
a starved body. One difference--where his face had the look of power
that compels respect and, to the shrewd, reveals relentless strength
relentlessly used, the expressions of the others were simply small and
mean and frost-nipped. And that is the rule--the second generation of a
plutocrat inherits, with his money, the meanness that enabled him to hoard
it, but not the scope that enabled him to make it.
Pages:
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280