Armitage and I were together every day. He attracted me for the usual reason of congeniality, and also because he was giving me a liberal education. I have never cared for books or, with two or three exceptions, for book men. About both there is for me an atmosphere of staleness, of tedium. I prefer to get what is in the few worth-while books through the medium of some clear and original mind--such a mind as Armitage had. He ought to have been a great man. No, he was a great man; what I mean to say is that his talents ought to have won his greatness recognition. He did not lack capacity or energy; he showed a high degree of both in the management and increase of his fortune. He lacked that species of vanity, I guess it is, which spurs a man to make himself conspicuous. Also he had a kind of laziness, and chose to be active only in the way that was easiest and most agreeable for him--the making of money. His father had been rich, and his grandfather; his great grandfather had been one of the richest men in Revolutionary times. His father was regarded as a crank because he had imagination, and therefore despised the conventional ideas of his own generation; to be regarded as thoroughly sane and sensible, you must be careful to be neither, but to pattern yourself painstakingly upon the particular form of feeble-mindedness and conventional silliness current in your time. Armitage’s father resolved that his son should not have his individuality clipped and moulded and patterned by college and caste into the familiar type of upper-class man. So Armitage went to public school, graduated from it into a factory, then into an office, himself earned the money to carry out the ambitions for study and travel with which his father had inspired him. I think there was nothing worth the knowing about which Armitage had not accurate essential information--books, plays, pictures, music, literature, history, economics, science, medicine, law, finance. He was a good shot and a good horseman, could run an automobile, take it to pieces, put it together again. He was a practical mechanic and a practical railroad man. He had a successful model farm. “It doesn’t take long to learn the essentials about anything,” said he, “if you will only put your whole mind on it and not let up till you’ve got what you want. And the trouble with most people--why, they are narrow and ignorant and incompetent--it isn’t lack of mind, but lack of interest. They have no curiosity.” Nor was my friend Armitage a smatterer. He didn’t try to _do_ everything; he contented himself with knowledge, and _did_ only one thing--made money out of railroads.