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foreclose a mortgage, do you not feel some compunction for a fellow creature?” Willy had learned his business well at the Counting Room on Prince Street. Compunction? “No,” he answered. “We could never feel the emotion you suggest, because we are not taking the Mortgagor’s money from him but our own.” “The great man listened dubiously,” his visitor recalled, “and turned the talk to other things.”
    â€œIn boyhood,” Astor wrote toward the end of his life, “I was taught that I and the Estate would some day be one and that my life would be judged by my success or failure in its control…. My business education began on simple lines. I was instructed in double-entry bookkeeping. With a pocket map-book I was taken to inspect our real estate scattered in little patches from the Battery to Harlem. I was taught the art and mystery of coupon-clipping and in my time must have cut a barrelful of coupons…. I did the work in turn of every junior member of the office staff.” Serious, well trained, and conspicuously intelligent, he had a passion for art and history but appeared to be obediently headed for a life of duty much like his father’s and grandfather’s, as guardian and multiplier of old John Jacob Astor’s high-piled wealth and pillar of the American upper class.
    â€œI was myself brought up severely and kept upon a pitiful allowance,” William recalled. “I lived in an atmosphere of sinister religion filled with hobgoblins…. I was a mischievous little animal and everybody kept telling me I was so bad. The hellfire sermons of my childhood, the like of which no congregation out of Scotland would listen to today, frightened me silly and I knew those red hot things were being made ready for me. ” Even in his mature years he was sometimes oppressed by the theological gloom of his boyhood in his parents’ somber mansion. “Sunday was a day of penance. My Mother fixed the employment of the hours left free between morning and afternoon service. No exercise, nor game, nor merriment. To walk (except to Church) was Sabbath breaking, to whistle a tune, sin. To write a letter, or pay a visit, or read a newspaper or listen to music was desecration. Apart from Church, it must be a day of idle vacuity. ‘I see no reason,’ she said, ‘why a Christian should not be cheerful,’ a phrase which now sounds ridiculous. She was proficient in the Christian doctrine of sin.” Many years later, leaving church after a Sunday service, he once said to his daughter Pauline (as she recalled), “I can never understand how we can thank God for our creation.”
    Brought up by governesses in the absence of a more than ceremonial and devotional relationship with his parents, educated at home by private tutors before he was enrolled at Columbia Grammar School, restricted in his reading to history and biography of an improving sort, Willy had grown up companionless. All his life he was to be torn between warring natures: the one romantic, artistic, and solitary; the other obedient to the principle of order, discipline, piety, and control that was part of his heritage. An expert chess player, he trained his memory by playing blindfolded and said the game had taught him “that in all things concentration is the key to success.” In later life Willy’s shyness and sensitivity often took the protective forms of truculence, impulsiveness, and a thickening crust of self-reserve. His chess-disciplined nature showed itself in obsessive personal habits. He demanded that his desk pencils be arranged with parade-ground precision.
    Despite the Calvinist rigors of his upbringing, during the time abroad that his parents allowed him—at the university in Gottingen and then in Italy—the more open side of his nature flourished. Willy developed an educated and acquisitive passion for Renaissance art and classical antiquities.