Oliver had been born "delicate" and, by maternal anxiety and coddling, had been kept so.
"I don't dare have other children after my experience with Oliver," his mother confided to her intimates. "Besides, I must devote my life to him." And, as it proved that she had twenty years of life left to devote, Oliver was almost of age before he escaped the regime of doctor's diets, prescribed physical exercises and private tutors which altogether had fixed firmly in his consciousness that he was not, and never could be, as other men.
Frequently during Oliver's youth, when his father and his uncle were on speaking terms, Lucas jeered at John for the folly of Oliver's upbringing and boasted the perfect health of his own sons under more rigorous ideas of rearing. But John lived in the terror which only, a strong man, who had acquired much, can feel for the safety of his only son and heir; and his wife, too, had worked her dreads upon him.
"Yes, your way seems good for your boys," John would concede to Lucas. "But we have to be careful with Oliver, or we won't have him at all."
So, after a while, Lucas ceased to advise. If John wanted his boy a damned weakling, that was John's business, and all the more would go to Lucas and his sons. Thus Oliver continued to diet and exercise and study for an established number of hours a day in his rooms on the third floor of the prim, fashionable city home on Scott Street; upon fair afternoons, at appointed times, a riding master might appear, and Oliver would trot, in perfect form and upon a most thoroughly broken and trustworthy horse, around the corner to the Drive and up the bridle paths beside the lake to Lincoln Park. When the season came for his
