He had admitted this much to a few of his friends, and they had laughed at him.

One evening he had opened his heart a little to the girl of the hyacinth letter, and after that she had called him eccentric.

Within himself he knew that he was unlike other men, that the blood in him was calling back to almost forgotten generations, when strong hearts and steady hands counted for manhood rather than stocks and bonds, and when romance and adventure were not quite dead.

At college he took civil engineering, because it seemed to him to breathe the spirit of outdoors; and when he had finished he incurred the wrath of those at home by burying himself for a whole year with a surveying expedition in Central America.
It was this expedition that put the finishing touch to Philip Steele.
He came back a big hearted, clear minded young fellow, as bronzed as an Aztec--a hater of cities and the hothouse varieties of pleasure to which he had been born, and as far removed from anticipation of his father's millions as though they had never been.

He possessed a fortune in his own right, but as yet he had found no use for the income that was piling up.