The details are not clear.

But when their only child, Joe, was six years old, the mother ran away with a carpenter who had been at work on the house for some six weeks.

A maiden aunt of some fifty years, who was a worshiper of the professor's cult, came to keep his house and to train Joe in the way that good boys should go.
"But the lad proved rather too great a burden, and when he was thirteen they sent him to a school out here in the West, ostensibly for the benefit of the climate.

The boy, it was said, being of abnormal mentality, needed to pursue his studies under the most favorable physical conditions.

The professor, unhampered by his offspring, continued to climb his aesthetic ladder to intellectual and cultured glory.