His father’s old resentments flared. Finding Quincy unresponsive, silent, disagreeable, he turned to Sarah and asked what, after all, _her_ child was likely to be good for. Rhoda came to feel in him a deep, glowing animosity that showed in the curl of his lips when she appeared in a ball gown, or in his refusal to look and join the chorus of admiration, when she received a present or a compliment. She tossed her head and decided that Quincy was an ugly little fellow with no respect for beauty or superiority--a little fellow whom she must in consequence ignore. Jonas discovered that when he wished to tell his brother some loathsome, funny story, Quincy declined to be dazzled or bewildered or amused. He learned to dislike heartily the cold aloofness with which, during that year, Quincy received his visits from college and rebuffed his chance efforts at attention. So Jonas also resolved to ignore his brother. It did not occur to him that he had already killed the boy’s love of fellowship with him; it did not occur to Rhoda that he needed protection from the anguish which her ways had brought to his rapt admiration. To the family, it was plain that a discordant element was within it. And that was all. Sarah did not understand. She was almost won over by the very prevalence of the opinion that Quincy’s manner was a natural weed and the sole cause of his own tribulation. But although she was not mind-proof to this insidious crowd-psychology, her heart had power against it; and it bled at the breach which, at last, she had been brought to see. However she might feel called on to remonstrate with him, she was intuitively on Quincy’s side. Of course, in the very fact of her remonstrance, she defeated the good her sympathy might have done. Quincy wished for no pity. He demanded full understanding. Her way was not whole-hearted enough; was too finite; was too eloquent of the influence of the “other side.” Deprived of most, Quincy had become more exacting than ever. Feeling his mother’s sense of his own fault, a tendency in her to see a shred of right against him, he rejected her. And this he did cruelly, coldly,--without explanation; so that the bewildered Sarah wrung her hands and ate out her heart. In the boy’s breast smouldered not agony alone; but with it a need of vindication. The family were so far from him that he knew well the futility of reaching them. Even his resentment, he was aware, could not attain them. And so it was that not only his instinct for affection had been starved; even his sense of injury, since it was unblazoned, had been injured also.