dealt through all his business life chiefly—and indeed as far as was possible to him—with things in preference to dealing with people, because he had no knack of dealing with people. John Rountree, in fact, distrusted people; he did not really like them; he trusted, instead, things and liked to deal in things; he understood things; he did not understand personal relations.
Once, he had done well because his father had dealt in personal relations sufficiently to make a lifelong friend of Stanley Alban, and the son had inherited this friend who had stood by him until this day. Moreover, at the start, there had been no competitors; so people had to come to John Rountree and he could succeed, dealing only in things. But conditions changed and required personal relations with many sorts of people; and John Rountree, having no knack for them, forbade them and called them outrageous and wrong.
Suddenly Ellen's breast was aflutter as she gazed at Jay, in the sunlight and spotted shade of the trees, and there was made clear to her the roots of the hostility between his father and him which had enlisted her with him before ever she had seen him.
Jay had been born with the knack to prosper through his liking for people and theirs for him; it endowed him with ability to succeed by merely forming personal relations which set at nothing and ignored the father's training to things; and this, to his father, was what was wrong in the world. His father wouldn't have it, in the world; but his father could not alter it, so he took out his grudge against it in the world by bitter determination to break it and deny it in his son.
