Beatty was a black sheep who gloried in the title. He had a brilliant mind that he never harnessed for profitable toil, a will that mocked at scruple or stricture. He loved horses and liquor, strife and revelry. He had a tongue like a skinning knife; he included the Almighty in all conversations. His spirit cherished and magnified affront. His conduct was definitely un-English, and Caroline Kipling, the ardent Anglican, was bitter in her reproaches.
There was trouble when Beatty had been purchasing agent for his brother-in-law, and Caroline audited the bills, There was greater trouble when Kipling offered to support Beatty's wife and child for a year if Beatty would go away end devote himself to honest toil elsewhere. Beatty met this charitable proposal with a dazzling display of Balestier rage.
Squabble followed squabble, each more bitter than the last. The final overt act, Beatty related 39 years later, was à quarrel over property. He sold the Kiplings a meadow Which lay between them and the Neulahka view, with the expecta-bop, he said, that he would always be allowed fo take the hay: jthaf grew there, "And then, by God, I heard tha: Caroline was going to turn it into formal garden. When they were at dinner at my house I asked if it was true. Caroline said it w and we had a quarrel, Rud just sat there." For a year after that the families did not speak.
If Kipling had kept his counsel he might, even after all this, have lived and died in Vermont. But he talked, and his comments got back to Beatty. Anger born 39 yea before still shook Beatty's voice as he told of the insult.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.