literature which nourished his darkling spirit, might fitly have been
written Mystery. The sister whom he reprobated was only two years his
elder, but since that difference in a girl accounts for a great deal, it
apparently authorized her to take him more lightly than he was able to
take himself. She said that he was in love, and she achieved an
importance with him through his speechless rage and scorn which none of
the rest of his family enjoyed. With his father and mother he had a
bearing of repressed superiority which a strenuous conscience kept from
unmasking itself in open contempt when they failed to make his sister
promise to behave herself. Sometimes he had lapses from his dignified
gloom with his mother, when, for no reason that could be given, he fell
from his habitual majesty to the tender dependence of a little boy, just
as his voice broke from its nascent base to its earlier treble at moments
when he least expected or wished such a thing to happen. His stately but
vague ideal of himself was supported by a stature beyond his years, but
this rendered it the more difficult for him to bear the humiliation of
his sudden collapses, and made him at other times the easier prey of
Lottie's ridicule. He got on best, or at least most evenly, with his
eldest sister. She took him seriously, perhaps because she took all life
so; and she was able to interpret him to his father when his intolerable
dignity forbade a common understanding between them. When he got so far
beyond his depth that he did not know what he meant himself, as sometimes
happened, she gently found him a safe footing nearer shore.

Kenton's theory was that he did not distinguish among his children.
He said that he did not suppose they were the best children in the world,
but they suited him; and he would not have known how to change them for
the better. He saw no harm in the behavior of Lottie when it most
shocked her brother; he liked her to have a good time; but it flattered
his nerves to have Ellen about him. Lottie was a great deal more