He was becoming a stickler for his rights in every transaction.
"John," said Bob, one day after John had cut a particularly lamentable figure, gouging a driver in a settlement, "don't you know that your rights are often others' wrongs ?" John was silent a moment.

He looked at the driver moving away, and then the boy's face set hard and he said: "Well--what's the use of blubbering over him?
If I don't get it, some one else will.

I'm no charitable institution for John Walruff's brewery!" And he snapped the rubber band on his wallet viciously, and turned to his books.
But on the other hand he wrote every other day to his mother and every other day to Ellen Culpepper with unwavering precision.

He told his mother the news, and he told Ellen Culpepper the news plus some Emerson, something more of "Faust," with such dashes of Longfellow and Ruskin as seemed to express his soul.

He never wrote to Ellen of money, and so strong was her influence upon him that when he had written to her after his quarrel with the driver, he went out in the night, hunted the man up, and paid him the disputed wages.