Go! That was about--well, let me see!--pretty near sixty
years ago: this is '75, and that was '20. Well, say I'm
fifty-five years old; and I've LIVED 'em, too; not an hour
of waste time about ME, anywheres! I was born on a farm,
and----"

"Worked in the fields summers and went to school winters:
regulation thing?" Bartley cut in.

"Regulation thing," said Lapham, accepting this irreverent
version of his history somewhat dryly.

"Parents poor, of course," suggested the journalist.
"Any barefoot business? Early deprivations of any kind,
that would encourage the youthful reader to go and do
likewise? Orphan myself, you know," said Bartley, with a
smile of cynical good-comradery.

Lapham looked at him silently, and then said with quiet
self-respect, "I guess if you see these things as a joke,
my life won't interest you."

"Oh yes, it will," returned Bartley, unabashed. "You'll see;
it'll come out all right." And in fact it did so,
in the interview which Bartley printed.

"Mr. Lapham," he wrote, "passed rapidly over the story
of his early life, its poverty and its hardships,
sweetened, however, by the recollections of a devoted mother,
and a father who, if somewhat her inferior in education,