Otherwise, he would have pensioned Jim off, and dismissed him
from his mind as a useless, insignificant person; for Horace, Anacreon,
and philosophy and history were to him the recreations of the
feeble-minded. He had set his heart on Jim, and what Jim could do and
would do by and by in the vast financial concerns he controlled, when he
was ready to slip out and down; but Jim had disappointed him beyond
calculation.
In the early days of their association Jim had left his post and taken to
drink at critical moments in their operations. At first, high words had
been spoken; then there came the strife of two dissimilar natures, and
both were headstrong, and each proud and unrelenting in his own way.
Then, at last, had come the separation, irrevocable and painful; and Jim
had flung out into the world, a drunkard, who, sober for a fortnight or a
month, or three months, would afterward go off on a spree, in which he
quoted Sappho and Horace in taverns, and sang bacchanalian songs with a
voice meant for the stage--a heritage from an ancestor who had sung upon
the English stage a hundred years before. Even in his cups, even after
his darling vice had submerged him, Jim Templeton was a man marked out
from his fellows, distinguished and very handsome.
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