His father was a great business man, and in forty years of intelligent, incessant and unscrupulous effort amassed a vast fortune so invested that it gave the possessor control of an enormous financial and industrial area. The father was a self-made man; he had a profound reverence for book-learning; he was resolved that none of his own deficiencies should be reproduced in his son. His boy was to be a “cultured gentleman,” moving in the “best society.” Also, the boy should have all the “fun” which first poverty and then business cares had denied to the old man. He sent young Jones to the most famous schools both here and abroad; and he gave him plenty of money. It is not definitely known whether the old man was proud of the results of his method of bringing up a boy so far as he saw them before he died; but there is reason to believe that he was. Certainly, the boy was as different as it is possible to imagine from his plain, rather coarse, very manly if also very unscrupulous father. The boy had all his father’s supreme contempt for the ordinary moral code and for the mass of “weaklings” who live under it and suffer themselves to be plucked. There the resemblance between the two ends. In place of a brain, the boy acquired at college and elsewhere a lump of vanities, affectations and poses. Surrounded by hirelings from infancy, he became convinced that he was the handsomest in body and the most brilliant in mind that the world had in recent centuries produced. He thought, having been assured of it by shopkeepers and agents, that his taste was almost too fine for a coarse, commercial era, that his nerves were almost too delicate even for the works of the greatest musicians and painters and sculptors and poets, that he was living both within and without a sort of tone-poem.