"Good, clean soot; it's our life-blood, God bless it!" The smoke was
one of his great enthusiasms; he laughed at a committee of plaintive
housewives who called to beg his aid against it. "Smoke's what brings
your husbands' money home on Saturday night," he told them, jovially.
"Smoke may hurt your little shrubberies in the front yard some, but
it's the catarrhal climate and the adenoids that starts your chuldern
coughing. Smoke makes the climate better. Smoke means good health:
it makes the people wash more. They have to wash so much they wash
off the microbes. You go home and ask your husbands what smoke puts
in their pockets out o' the pay-roll--and you'll come around next time
to get me to turn out more smoke instead o' chokin' it off!"

It was Narcissism in him to love the city so well; he saw his
reflection in it; and, like it, he was grimy, big, careless, rich,
strong, and unquenchably optimistic. From the deepest of his inside
all the way out he believed it was the finest city in the world.
"Finest" was his word. He thought of it as his city as he thought
of his family as his family; and just as profoundly believed his city
to be the finest city in the world, so did he believe his family to
be--in spite of his son Bibbs--the finest family in the world. As a
matter of fact, he knew nothing worth knowing about either.

Bibbs Sheridan was a musing sort of boy, poor in health, and
considered the failure--the "odd one"--of the family. Born during
that most dangerous and anxious of the early years, when the mother
fretted and the father took his chance, he was an ill-nourished baby,
and grew meagerly, only lengthwise, through a feeble childhood. At
his christening he was committed for life to "Bibbs" mainly through
lack of imagination on his mother's part, for though it was her maiden
name, she had no strong affection for it; but it was "her turn" to