As he looked, he seemed already to have surrendered his individuality, swallowed up in the army of labor, and the revolt arose in him anew. What was the use of money if it could not bring a wider horizon and greater opportunities? And a sort of dull anger moved in him against the parental ambition which limited him to unnecessary drudgery. Of all the persons he had met the greatest stranger to him was his father. Since his mother's death, when he was but eight years of age, his life had been spent in boarding school and college, in summer camps or on visits to chums. Their relations had been formal. At the beginning and end of each summer he had come down the long avenue of desks, past the glass doors into the private office, to report, to receive money, and to be sped with a few appropriate words of advice. Several times during the year his father would appear on a short warning, stay a few hours, and hurry off. On such occasions Tom had always felt that he was being surveyed and estimated as a lumberman watches the growth of a young forest. His father was always in a hurry, always in good health, matter of fact, and generous. That his business had prospered and extended he knew, though to what extent his father's activities had multiplied he still was ignorant. Conversation between them had always been difficult in those tours of inspection; but Bojo, instinctively, censored the lithographs on the wall (harmless though they were) and the choice of novels which his father would be sure to examine with a critical eye. Klondike, the sweep, arranged the room in military order and Fred DeLancy was enjoined to observe a bread-and-milk diet. Bojo had an idea that his father was very stern, rigid, and exact, with the unrelenting attitude toward folly and leisure which had characterized the Crocker family in the days of their seven celebrated divines. "How are you, Tom?" said a chest-voice behind him. "Turn around. You look in first-class shape. Glad to see you." "Glad to see you, father," he said hastily, taking the stubby, powerful hand. "Just a moment--go on with your cigar. Let me straighten out this desk. Train was ten minutes late." "Now it comes," thought Bojo to himself as he gripped his hands and assumed a determined frown. As they faced each other they were astonishingly alike and unlike. They had the same squaring of the brows, the same obstinate rise of the head at the back, and the prominent undershot jaw. Years had thickened the frame of the father and written characteristic lines about the mouth and the eyes. He had become so integral a part of the machine he had created that in the process all the finer youthful shades of expression had faded away.