could compel himself to care for nineteenth-century style. He was
never able to adopt it, any more than his father or grandfather
or great-grandfather had done. Not that he felt it as
particularly hostile, for he reconciled himself to much that was
worse; but because, for some remote reason, he was born an
eighteenth-century child. The old house at Quincy was eighteenth
century. What style it had was in its Queen Anne mahogany panels
and its Louis Seize chairs and sofas. The panels belonged to an
old colonial Vassall who built the house; the furniture had been
brought back from Paris in 1789 or 1801 or 1817, along with
porcelain and books and much else of old diplomatic remnants; and
neither of the two eighteenth-century styles -- neither English
Queen Anne nor French Louis Seize -- was cofortable for a boy, or
for any one else. The dark mahogany had been painted white to
suit daily life in winter gloom. Nothing seemed to favor, for a
child's objects, the older forms. On the contrary, most boys, as
well as grown-up people, preferred the new, with good reason, and
the child felt himself distinctly at a disadvantage for the
taste.

Nor had personal preference any share in his bias. The Brooks
grandfather was as amiable and as sympathetic as the Adams
grandfather. Both were born in 1767, and both died in 1848. Both
were kind to children, and both belonged rather to the eighteenth
than to the nineteenth centuries. The child knew no difference
between them except that one was associated with winter and the
other with summer; one with Boston, the other with Quincy. Even
with Medford, the association was hardly easier. Once as a very
young boy he was taken to pass a few days with his grandfather
Brooks under charge of his aunt, but became so violently homesick