Nevertheless Roger Galbraith, if not the warrior his progenitor had
been, presented no unmanly appearance. Neither self-indulgence nor
effeminacy branded him. In fact, there was in his manner a certain
magnetism and warmth of sympathy that the elder man could not boast,
and it was because of this asset he had never wanted for friends and
probably never would want for them. Through the talisman of charm he
would exact from others the service which the more autocratic nature
commanded.
Yet in spite of the opposition of their personalities, Robert Morton
cherished toward both father and son a sincere affection which differed
only in the quality of the response the two men called forth. Mr.
Galbraith he admired and revered; Roger he loved.
Had he but known it, each of the Galbraiths in their turn esteemed
Robert Morton for widely contrasting reasons. The New York financier
found in him a youth after his own heart,--a fine student and hard
worker, who had fought his way to an education because necessity
confronted him with the choice of going armed or unarmed into life's
fray. Although comfortably off, Mr. Morton senior was a man of limited
income whose children had been forced to battle for what they had
wrested from fortune. Success had not come easily to any of them, and
the winning of it had left in its wake a self-reliance and independence
surprisingly mature. Ironically enough, this power to fend for himself
which Mr. Galbraith so heartily endorsed and respected in Bob was the
very characteristic of which he had deprived his own boy, the vast
fortune the capitalist had rolled up eliminating all struggle from
Roger's career. Every barrier had been removed, every thwarting force
had been brought into abeyance, and afterward, with an inconsistency
typical of human nature, the leveler of the road fretted at his son's
lack of aggressiveness, his eyes, ordinarily so hawklike in their
vision, blinded to the fact that what his son was he had to a great
extent made him, and if the product caused secret disappointment he had
no one to thank for it but himself. Instead his reasoning took the
bias that the younger man, having been given every opportunity, should
logically have increased the Galbraith force of character rather than
have diminished it, and very impatient was he that such had not proved
to be the case.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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