mouth. Vandover's father put his hand and arm along the back of the
chair and his sick wife rested against him, leaning her head on his
waistcoat over the pocket where he kept his cigars and pocket-comb. They
were all silent.

By and by she drew a long sigh, her face became the face of an imbecile,
stupid, without expression, her eyes half-closed, her mouth half-open.
Her head rolled forward as though she were nodding in her sleep, while a
long drip of saliva trailed from her lower lip. Vandover's father bent
over her quickly, crying out sharply, "Hallie!--what is it?" All at once
the train for which they were waiting charged into the depot, filling
the place with a hideous clangor and with the smell of steam and of hot
oil.

This scene of her death was the only thing that Vandover could remember
of his mother.

As he looked back over his life he could recall nothing after this for
nearly five years. Even after that lapse of time the only scene he could
picture with any degree of clearness was one of the greatest triviality
in which he saw himself, a rank thirteen-year-old boy, sitting on a bit
of carpet in the back yard of the San Francisco house playing with his
guinea-pigs.

In order to get at his life during his teens, Vandover would have been
obliged to collect these scattered memory pictures as best he could,
rearrange them in some more orderly sequence, piece out what he could
imperfectly recall and fill in the many gaps by mere guesswork and
conjecture.