unimpeachable butter, and falling leaves, and only a very few
congenial people to be melancholy with,--and that sort of thing, you
know. I find it freshens one up so against the winter."

It was a signal feature of my mother's conversation that you never
understood, precisely, what she was talking about.

Thus in her train the silly, pretty woman drew otherwhither her
hobbledehoy son, as indeed Claire Bulmer Townsend had aforetime drawn
an armament of more mature and stolid members of my sex. I was always
proud of my handsome mother, but without any aspirations, however
theoretical, toward intimacy; and her periods of conscientious if
vague affection, when she recollected its propriety, I endured with
consolatory foreknowledge of an impendent, more agreeable era of
neglect.

I fancy that at bottom I was without suspecting it lonely. I was an
only child; my father had died, as has been hinted, when I was in
kilts.... No, I must have graduated from kilts into "knee-pants" when
the Democracy of Lichfield celebrated Grover Cleveland's first
election as President, for I was seven years old then, and was allowed
to stay up ever so late after supper to watch the torchlight parade. I
recollect being rather pleasantly scared by the yells of all those
marching people and by the glistening of their faces as the irregular
flaring torches heaved by; and I recollect how delightfully the cold
night air was flavored with kerosene. In any event, it was on this
generally festive November night that my father again took too much to
drink, and, coming home toward morning, lay down and went to sleep in
the vestibule between our front-door and the storm-doors; and five
days later died of pneumonia...In that era I was accounted an odd boy;