And then there was Graham. He, like untold hundreds of his type, had a
certain amount of precocity, but no knowledge. He had merely peeked at
the truth of things through a chink. He had looked at life with the
salacious eyes of a Peeping Tom. And what was the result? Worse than
total ignorance. Deep down in whatever soul he had, Nicholas Kenyon
honestly and truly believed in friendship between father and son. He
knew--none better--because it was his business to observe, that a young
man was frightfully and terribly handicapped who went out into the world
unwarned, unadvised and uninitiated. He had often come across men like
Peter and Graham whose lives had been absolutely ruined at the very
outset for the reason that their fathers had either been too cowardly or
too indifferent to give them the benefit of their own experience and
early troubles. In fact, most of the men he knew--and he knew a great
many--had been left to discover the essential truths and facts for
themselves. The inevitable end of it was that they made their
discoveries too late.
Fate certainly must have had a very grim amusement in watching Nicholas
Kenyon as he walked up and down the library of Dr. Hunter Guthrie's
house that night, blazing at the delinquencies of fathers. Nevertheless,
Kenyon had the right to be indignant, whether his reasons for being so
sprang out of his selfishness or not. His own father was an
unscrupulous, unserious man, that was true, but at any rate he had given
his son a human chance. He could take it or leave it as he liked. And
when Kenyon, piecing together all that he had heard of Dr. Guthrie from
Peter, from Graham and from Belle, added all that to the very obvious
fact that these two boys were out in the world with blind eyes, he burst
into a scoffing laugh. In his mind's eye he could see the excellent and
distinguished Doctor rounding his back over experiments for the benefit
of humanity, while he utterly neglected to give two of the human beings
for whom he was responsible the few words of advice which would render
it unnecessary for them to become his patients.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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