Luke got well after cursing doctor, nurse, and family for several weeks: it was stubborn typhoid.
Gant was now head of a numerous family, which rose ladderwise from infancy to the adolescent Steve—who was eighteen—and the maidenly Daisy. She was seventeen and in her last year at high school. She was a timid, sensitive girl, looking like her name—Daisy-ish industrious and thorough in her studies: her teachers thought her one of the best students they had ever known. She had very little fire, or denial in her; she responded dutifully to instructions; she gave back what had been given to her. She played the piano without any passionate feeling for the music; but she rendered it honestly with a beautiful rippling touch. And she practised hours at a time.
It was apparent, however, that Steve was lacking in scholarship. When he was fourteen, he was summoned by the school principal to his little office, to take a thrashing for truancy and insubordination. But the spirit of acquiescence was not in him: he snatched the rod from the man’s hand, broke it, smote him solidly in the eye, and dropped gleefully eighteen feet to the ground.
This was one of the best things he ever did: his conduct in other directions was less fortunate. Very early, as his truancy mounted, and after he had been expelled, and as his life hardened rapidly in a defiant viciousness, the antagonism between the boy and Gant grew open and bitter. Gant recognized perhaps most of his son’s vices as his own: there was little, however, of his redeeming quality. Steve had a piece of tough suet where his heart should have been.
Of them all, he had had very much the worst of it. Since his childhood he had been the witness of his father’s wildest debauches. He had not forgotten. Also, as the oldest, he was left to shift for himself while Eliza’s attention focussed on her younger children. She was feeding Eugene at her breast long after
