The nature of Quincy, however, made all this easier for Adelaide. These were perhaps the blandest years, the most harmonious, of his life. But even here there was within him a source of conflict, a rift, destined to debar him from gracious or facile living. Adelaide found him slow to follow up a game or play into which, with the best impulse, he had entered. Always, there lay in him the instinct to retire, to grow cool, to wander off lack-spirited before her own climax of enthusiasm. Suddenly, she would find that his mood was changed, that he was spiritually alone and aloof, while they pursued together the sequence of some sport. And, once thus removed from their common-ground of interest, there was no retrieving him. He would sit a-dream on the grass, cold before the sand pile which their mutual eagerness was to have transformed into a castle. If one addressed him then, he would not hear. If one tried to shake him from his reverie, he would scratch and bite and scream. This was all Adelaide knew. But behind his failure, even as a child, to sustain his interest, it mattered little in what end, there lurked a serious cause. Quincy lacked soul-endurance. The part of him that should have fired his acts seemed scant of fuel. And from this want had come a timidness of purpose, a tendency to veer and flutter and give way. Not only in the face of opposition was this true, but in the effort of accomplishment, in the very fact of nearing what he had desired. The imminence of approach to that toward which he had set out with heart a-gleam, served to slacken his pace and to disaffect his will. Adelaide had suffered from this, in their serious business of play. Quincy’s own suffering, here as forever after, was to be indissolubly set in the suffering he helped to cause in others. And at the time of this first instance, with its result of a tragic disaffection, he was not yet eight. V There was but a short interim between the alliance with Adelaide and the beginning of the reign of Jonas. These were dull days of autumn. And during them, Quincy was put to school. This new event, however, appeared to involve him slightly. It taxed a surface of his attention. Its influence was neither encompassing nor deep. For Quincy was the kind of child who always precedes, in that he is an individual, the class in which his years cause him arbitrarily to be placed. With such, the average drone-exercise of school is an ugly filler of what might elsewhere have been golden hours. But if the business of reading and addition meant little to him, the new will of Jonas to acknowledge him as vassal meant relatively much.