My brothers did this no more than experimentally, covering their tracks and returning to right ways before their digressions could be noticed. I was invariably caught, coming in for some dramatic moments with my father, which increased in tension with the years. I have often wondered what his own youth could have been that he had so little mercy on what was at first not much worse than high spirits and boisterousness. Though I am far from blaming any one but myself for my ultimately going wrong, I have sometimes thought that a gentler handling might have led me aright when sheer repression only made me obstinate. That gentler handling my mother would have given me had not my father felt that it was weak. This knowledge only added to my perversity, the result being a state of continuous rebellion on my part and permanent displeasure on his. “You’re getting in worse and worse with the old man,” my brother Jack warned me a few months before I left Montreal for good. “I heard him telling mother that if you didn’t turn over a new leaf he’d cut you out of his will.” The information that he had so cut me out was the last form of appeal he ever made to me. I didn’t believe he meant it otherwise than as a bluff—a stroke of the pen could have reinstated me; but merely as a bluff it angered me. It implied that I might be induced to do for money what I hadn’t done for love or duty, and I was foolish enough to consider it part of my manhood to prove that any one who so judged me was mistaken. In that phase of my misguided life there was a kind of crazy, Cordelia-like attempt to show my father that it was not because of his money that I cared for him—or didn’t care for him; but all I succeeded in doing was to rouse the resentment of a man who had hardly ever been defied. But I had repented of that kind of bravado long before I had repented of anything else. My letter to him in October had been quite sincere. To be cut out of his will had never meant anything to me but the loss of his affection. I was sorry for that loss, sorrier than any words I have could tell you. But when he wrote to me, in answer to my October letter, I knew from his tone that I had definitely killed whatever had once existed between him and me, and that all that was left for me was to bury it. I had been trying to bury it for the past eight weeks, and I do not deny that the effort was a bitter one. You must understand that I had now come in for a set of emotions that had not belonged to me before I went to the Down and Out. I can explain it only on the ground that months of abstinence from anything that could inflame the senses or disturb the poise of the mind had induced a sanity of judgment to which I had been a stranger. In this new light I was really a prodigal son—not from any hope of a ring on my hand or the fatted calf, but genuinely from affection for the parents I had wronged.