His nature unfitted him to
accept failure. He had the gift of terrible persistence, and with
unflecked confidence that his way was the only way he would hold to
that way of "making a man" of Bibbs, who understood very well, in his
passive and impersonal fashion, that it was a way which might make,
not a man, but dust of him. But he had no shudder for the thought.
He had no shudder for that thought or for any other thought. The
truth about Bibbs was in the poem which Edith had adopted: he had
so thoroughly formed the over-sensitive habit of hiding his feelings
that no doubt he had forgotten--by this time--where he had put some
of them, especially those which concerned himself. But he had not
hidden his feelings about his father where they could not be found.
He was strange to his father, but his father was not strange to him.
He knew that Sheridan's plans were conceived in the stubborn belief
that they would bring about a good thing for Bibbs himself; and
whatever the result was to be, the son had no bitterness. Far
otherwise, for as he looked at the big, woeful figure, shaking and
tortured, an almost unbearable pity laid hands upon Bibbs's throat.
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