With a face, voice, and manner trained through
forty years to terrify and repel, Rhadamanthus may be great, but he will
scarce be engaging. It is a fact that he tried to propitiate Archie,
but a fact that cannot be too lightly taken; the attempt was so
unconspicuously made, the failure so stoically supported. Sympathy is
not due to these steadfast iron natures. If he failed to gain his son's
friendship, or even his son's toleration, on he went up the great, bare
staircase of his duty, uncheered and undepressed. There might have been
more pleasure in his relations with Archie, so much he may have
recognised at moments; but pleasure was a by-product of the singular
chemistry of life, which only fools expected.
An idea of Archie's attitude, since we are all grown up and have
forgotten the days of our youth, it is more difficult to convey. He
made no attempt whatsoever to understand the man with whom he dined and
breakfasted. Parsimony of pain, glut of pleasure, these are the two
alternating ends of youth; and Archie was of the parsimonious.
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