represented him as a peculiarly capable and unappreci- ated man, the two did not in private get on well. In the Hunter household they quarreled and snarled at each other. Steve's mother had died when he was a small boy and his one sister, two years older than him- self, kept herself always in the house and seldom ap- peared on the streets. She was a semi-invalid. Some obscure nervous disease had twisted her body out of shape, and her face twitched incessantly. One morn- ing in the barn back of the Hunter house Steve, then a lad of fourteen, was oiling his bicycle when his sister appeared and stood watching him. A small wrench lay on the ground and she picked it up. Suddenly and without warning she began to beat him on the head. He was compelled to knock her down in order to tear the wrench out of her hand. After the incident she was ill in bed for a month. Elsie Hunter was always a source of unhappiness to her brother. As he began to get up in life Steve had a growing passion for being respected by his fellows. It got to be something of an obsession with him and among other things he wanted very much to be thought of as one who had good blood in his veins. A man whom he hired searched out his an- cestry, and with the exception of his immediate family it seemed very satisfactory. The sister, with her twisted body and her face that twitched so persist- ently, seemed to be everlastingly sneering at him. He grew half afraid to come into her presence. After he began to grow rich he married Ernestine, the daugh- ter of the soap maker at Buffalo, and when her father died she also had a great deal of money. His own father died and he set up a household of his own.
