affairs, and upon the nursing of a comparatively helpless old man who
could do hardly anything at all for himself.

Pa was in his bedroom,--the back room on the ground-floor, chosen
because he could not walk up the stairs, but must have as little trouble
in self-conveyance as possible,--staggeringly making his toilet for the
meal to come, sitting patiently in front of his dressing-table by the
light of a solitary candle. He would appear in due course, when he was
fetched. He had been a strong man, a runner and cricketer in his youth,
and rather obstreperously disposed; but that time was past, and his
strength for such pursuits was as dead as the wife who had suffered
because of its vagaries. He could no longer disappear on the Saturdays,
as he had been used to do in the old days. His chair in the kitchen, the
horse-hair sofa in the sitting-room, the bed in the bedroom, were the
only changes he now had from one day's end to another. Emmy and Jenny,
pledges of a real but not very delicate affection, were all that
remained to call up the sorrowful thoughts of his old love, and those
old times of virility, when Pa and his strength and his rough
boisterousness had been the delight of perhaps a dozen regular
companions. He sometimes looked at the two girls with a passionless
scrutiny, as though he were trying to remember something buried in
ancient neglect; and his eyes would thereafter, perhaps at the mere
sense of helplessness, fill slowly with tears, until Emmy, smothering
her own rough sympathy, would dab Pa's eyes with a harsh handkerchief
and would rebuke him for his decay. Those were hard moments in the
Blanchard home, for the two girls had grown almost manlike in abhorrence
of tears, and with this masculine distaste had arisen a corresponding
feeling of powerlessness in face of emotion which they could not share.
It was as though Pa had become something like an old and beloved dog,
unable to speak, pitied and despised, yet claiming by his very dumbness