Few young men of twenty-four can go very deeply into questions of
heredity. Of what follows here much was not known to Paul. Much that he
did know he would have interpreted differently. The old well at Stone
Ridge, for instance, had no place in his recital; and yet out of it sprang
the history of his shorn generation. Had Paul's mother grown up in a
houseful of brothers and sisters, governed by her mother instead of an old
ignorant servant, in all likelihood she would have married
differently--more wisely but not perhaps so well, her son would loyally
have maintained. The sons of the rich farmers who would have been her
suitors were men inferior to their fathers. They inherited the vigor and
coarseness of constitution, the unabashed materialism of that earlier
generation that spent its energies coping with Nature on its stony farms,
but the sons were spared the need of that hard labor which their blood
required. They supplied an element of force, but one of great corruption
later, in the state politics of their time.




IV


A MAN THAT HAD A WELL IN HIS OWN COURT

In the kitchen court called the "Airy" at Abraham Van Elten's, there was
one of those old family wells which our ancestors used to locate so
artlessly. And when it tapped the kitchen drain, and typhoid took the
elder children, and the mother followed the children, it was called the
will of God. A gloomy distinction rested on the house. Abraham felt the