But his motive in this teaching was not all pride in the neighborhood of his St. Florentin; nor was his attitude to be explained by considering it the natural, invidious contempt of the city on the part of the forester, the miner and the shipman. Lucas's rancor against Chicago was far more personal and was stirred by the fact that though Lucas once had moved to Chicago and for a long period spoke of himself as "of Chicago" when conversing with strangers, yet Chicagoans never had considered him one of them in the manner that they deemed his brother John a Chicagoan. Lucas claimed, indeed, that he had never desired them to; he had come to the city simply to please his children, and he loudly scorned the social preferment which his brother and his brother's wife and their son Oliver, the "damn weakling", had won.
To tell the whole truth, Lucas himself had for a short time gone into the race for social preferment; and occasionally he admitted it by boasting of his results; for if the gains for himself were negligible, his energies and expenditures certainly succeeded in acquiring for his children much of that which he coveted. In the marriage of his elder daughter to a nobleman of France, had he not indisputable proof that when he undertook to play the social "racket" he had proved himself far more capable than John? For John's only child, Oliver, had married whom? A stenographer. No one of Lucas's four children had done as badly as that.
Lucas habitually terminated his reference to his nephew's wife with a statement of her position in the world when Oliver married her; her later position accorded less perfectly with Lucas's fine talk about the superiority of his branch of the family. For though
