For one thing, his father was going to bring home
a new mother; a lady, he gathered, who had not only settled down to be a
good worker, but who, in espousing his father, would curiously not marry
beneath her. Without being told so, he had absorbed from his first
mother a conviction that this was possible to but few women. He felt a
little glow of pride for his father in this affair.
Another matter that seemed to bear on his going away was that this
brilliant and human Uncle Bunker was a "trustee." Not only a trustee,
but _his_ trustee; his very own, like his shell, or anything. This led
to his discovery that he had money. His mother, it seemed, had left it
to him; Bunker money that the two older uncles had sought and failed to
divert from her on the occasion of her wedding one below her station.
Money! and the capable Uncle Bunker as trustee of that money! Money one
could buy things with! He was pleasantly conscious of being rather
important under the glance of familiars. Even his father spoke formal
words of counsel to him, as if a gulf was between them--his father now
bereft of all Bunker prestige, legal or social.
And the new uncle was to "educate" him, though this was to be paid for
out of that money of his very own. He was rudely shocked to learn that
you had to pay money to go to school. Loathing school as he did, to pay
money for your own torture--money that would buy things--seemed
unutterably silly.
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