In later life Margaret Ruggles’s nerve was iron and her _savoir faire_ flawless. Rumor had it that she instructed Amos how and when to do everything, from selling United Fruit Common to changing his waistcoat. And a local grocer had a yarn about having sent a special team out to the Ruggleses residence to deliver three lemons, and Margaret had ordered the man to wait and take back two of them because cook had discovered there were already two lemons in the house. She was a close buyer and a difficult customer and yet young Gordon—only child of these two—was allowed, from earliest boyhood, to spend money like a Monte Cristo in knickers. At three he cried for the moon but was given the earth instead, and found it so absorbing that he never gave it back. Not even when other people wanted it. Gordon had never gone to school three consecutive years in his life. He had never shown interest in anything for two consecutive days, in his life,—except fighting. Yet he even refused to make fighting a business, or he might have turned out a notable pugilist or worked his bellicosities off to some good purpose in the Army. Amos and Margaret absolutely refused to credit their son with faults. They looked at him and beheld that he had a body, a brain, a temperament and an appetite. But faults? Not a one! He committed indiscretions, irresponsibilities, sowed a few wild oats, perhaps! But that was to be expected. Why should he work when the Ruggleses already had more money than they could ever spend? Besides, why should he work when he wouldn’t work and they couldn’t make him work, even if they wanted? That he would ultimately “go in for something” as his father had “gone in” for law—and foreign travel—was vaguely understood. But the insinuation that Gordon was one whit worse than a million other boys they would not tolerate an instant. The Ruggleses—second generation—had a queer outlook on life, one which it is perhaps difficult for _hoi polloi_ to understand: The world was their personal bootjack and any one who essayed to question that fact was a “disturbing element” and “a menace against established institutions.”