III.
Harold Dartmouth came of a family celebrated throughout its history
for producing men of marked literary and political ability. Few
generations had passed without a Dartmouth distinguishing himself,
and those members of the family less gifted were not in the habit
of having their fine intellectual qualities called to account. The
consequence was that their young descendant, who inherited all the
family cleverness, although as yet he had betrayed the possession of
none of its higher gifts, paid the penalty of his mental patrimony.
His brain was abnormally active, both through conditions of heredity
and personal incitement; and the cerebral excitation necessarily
produced resulted not infrequently in violent reaction, which took the
form of protracted periods of melancholy. These attacks of melancholy
had begun during his early school-days, when, a remarkably bright
but extremely wild boy, he had been invariably fired with ambition as
examinations approached, and obliged to cram to make up for lost time.
As years went by they grew with his growth, and few months passed
without an attack of the blues more or less violent, no matter
how brief.
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