Then came the question: what did my father abstain from?
The workmen abstained from meat, drink, fresh air, good clothes, decent lodging, holidays, money, the society of their families, and pretty nearly everything that makes life worth living, which was perhaps the reason why they usually died twenty years or so sooner than people in our circumstances.

Yet no one rewarded them for their abstinence.

The reward came to my father, who abstained from none of these things, but indulged in them all to his heart's content.
Besides, if the money was the reward of abstinence, it seemed logical to infer that he must abstain ten times as much when he had fifty thousand a year as when he had only five thousand.

Here was a problem for my young mind.

Required, something from which my father abstained and in which his workmen exceeded, and which he abstained from more and more as he grew richer and richer.