My curiosity was inarticulate with a multitude of crowding questions. I couldn’t make my choice which to ask first. I watched the swans sail in and out the tethered boats, and racked my brain for words. Then I blurted out, “What does it all mean, Uncle Obad?” His eyes filled with tears. “My boy, it means success.” I mumbled something typically boylike and inadequate about being “jolly glad.” He slipped his arm through mine with that endearing familiarity he had, as though I were a man. He was too excited to sit down, so we strolled along the quays, under the creeper-covered redbrick walls of the houses, and out of Richmond along the open river-bank. “No one ever believed that I’d do it, Dante. I don’t think you did yourself. They all said, ‘Oh, Spreckles! Ha, the fellow who twiddles his thumbs while his wife works!’ They didn’t say it to my face--they didn’t dare. But that was what they thought about me. I seemed a failure--a good-natured incompetent. Even people who liked me felt ashamed of me--I mean people who were dear to me, living in the same house. Women want their husbands to measure up to the standards of other men. It’s natural--I don’t blame ’em. But, you know, I never had a chance, old chap--never seemed to find my right kind of work. I couldn’t do little things well. I’m one of those imperial men who need something big to bring the best out of’ ’em. And now I’ve got it--I’ve got it, Dante.” I caught his excitement, and begged him to tell me what this wonderful something was that had so suddenly transformed him from a nobody into a powerful person. I felt sure he was powerful, apart from anything he said, for he radiated opulence. He halted in the middle of the tow-path, gripping me by the shoulders, laughing into my face and bidding me guess. I guessed everything possible and impossible. Losing patience, “It’s diamond mines,” he burst out. “But how did you get ’em, Uncle Obad, and where?” For an instant I had a wild vision of men with pickaxes, shovels, and miners’ lamps, digging down into the bowels of the Christian Boarding House.