had never worked before and yet there was no joy in the work.  If things went well they went well for Jesse and never for the people who were his dependents.  Like a thousand other strong men who have come into the world here in America in these later times, Jesse was but half strong.  He could master others but he could not master himself.  The running of the farm as it had never been run before was easy for him.  When he came home from Cleveland where he had been in school, he shut himself off from all of his people and began to make plans.  He thought about the farm night and day and that made him successful.  Other men on the farms about him worked too hard and were too fired to think, but to think of the farm and to be everlastingly making plans for its success was a relief to Jesse.  It partially satisfied something in his passionate nature.  Immediately after he came home he had a wing built on to the old house and in a large room facing the west he had windows that looked into the barnyard and other windows that looked off across the fields.  By the window he sat down to think.  Hour after hour and day after day he sat and looked over the land and thought out his new place in life.  The passionate burning thing in his nature flamed up and his eyes became hard.  He wanted to make the farm produce as no farm in his state had ever produced before and then he wanted something else.  It was the indefinable hunger within that made his eyes waver and that kept him always more and more silent before people.  He would have given much to achieve peace and in him was a fear that peace was the thing he could not achieve.

All over his body Jesse Bentley was alive.  In his small frame was gathered the force of a long line of strong men.  He had always been extraordinarily alive when he was a small boy on the farm and later when he was a young man in school.  In the school he had studied and thought of God and the Bible with his whole mind and heart.  As time passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows.  He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also such a clod.  Although in his absorption in himself and in his own destiny he was blind to the fact that his young wife was doing a strong woman’s work even after she had become large with child and that she was killing herself in his service, he did not intend to be unkind to her.  When his father, who was old and twisted with toil, made over to him the ownership of the farm and seemed content to creep away to a corner and wait for death, he shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the old man from his mind.