Читать книгу A Book About Myself онлайн

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Then and there, as I have since noted with a kind of fatalistic curiosity, the last phase of my rather troublesome youth began. Up to and even including this last move to Taylor Street I had been intimately identified, in spirit at least, with our family and its concentrated home life. During my mother’s life, of course, I had felt that wherever she was was home; after her death it was the house in which she had lived that held me, quite as much as it was my father and those of us who remained together to keep up in some manner the family spirit. When the spell of this began to lessen, owing to bitter recrimination and the continuous development of individuality in all of us, this new branch home established by three of us seemed something of the old place and spiritually allied to it; but when it fell, and the old home broke up at about the same time, I felt completely adrift.

What was I to do with myself now? I asked. Where go? Here I was, soon (in three months) to be twenty-one years old, and yet without trade or profession, a sort of nondescript dreamer without the power to earn a decent living and yet with all the tastes and proclivities of one destined to an independent fortune. My eyes were constantly fixed on people in positions far above my own. Those who interested me most were bankers, millionaires, artists, executives, leaders, the real rulers of the world. Just at this time the nation was being thrown into its quadrennial ferment, the presidential election. The newspapers were publishing reams upon reams of information and comment. David B. Hill, then governor of New York, Grover Cleveland of New York, Thomas B. Hendricks of Indiana, and others were being widely and favorably discussed by the Democratic party, whose convention was to be held here in Chicago the coming June. Among the Republicans, Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, James G. Blaine of Maine, Thomas B. Allison of Iowa, and others were much to the fore.