There I struck the immovable,--the impassable.
I decided in one awful night of renunciation that I would send
Oliver out of my life.
The next day I told him abruptly ... hurting him to spare myself
... that I had decided after long and mature thought to yield to
his desire for journalism, and that I would start him in his
career and maintain him in it for three years if he would
subscribe to the following conditions:
They were the hardest a loving father ever imposed upon a dutiful
and loving son.
First: he was to leave home immediately ... within a few hours, in
fact.
Secondly: he was to regard all relations between us as finished;
we were to be strangers henceforth in every particular save that
of the money obligation already mentioned.
Thirdly: he was never to acknowledge this compact, or to cast any
slur upon the father whose reasons for this apparently unnatural
conduct were quite disconnected with any fault of his or any
desire to punish or reprove.
Fourthly: he was to pray for his father every night of his life
before he slept.
Was this last a confession? Had I meant it to be such? If so, it
missed its point. It awed but did not enlighten him. I had to
contend with his compunctions, as well as with his grief and
dismay. It was an hour of struggle on his part and of implacable
resolution on mine. Nothing but such hardness on my part would
have served me. Had I faltered once he would have won me over, and
the tale of my sleepless nights been repeated.
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