Before Alexandra was
twelve years old she had begun to be a help to him, and as she grew
older he had come to depend more and more upon her resourcefulness
and good judgment. His boys were willing enough to work, but when
he talked with them they usually irritated him. It was Alexandra
who read the papers and followed the markets, and who learned by
the mistakes of their neighbors. It was Alexandra who could always
tell about what it had cost to fatten each steer, and who could
guess the weight of a hog before it went on the scales closer than
John Bergson himself. Lou and Oscar were industrious, but he could
never teach them to use their heads about their work.
Alexandra, her father often said to himself, was like her
grandfather; which was his way of saying that she was intelligent.
John Bergson's father had been a shipbuilder, a man of considerable
force and of some fortune. Late in life he married a second time,
a Stockholm woman of questionable character, much younger than he,
who goaded him into every sort of extravagance. On the shipbuilder's
part, this marriage was an infatuation, the despairing folly of
a powerful man who cannot bear to grow old.
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