s of lead soldiers. He was growing
comfortable-looking, if not exactly stout; prematurely paternal, oddly
willing to renounce the fiercer joys of life, the joys of acquisition,
of conquest, of youth.

"You'd better come home with me, Chickabiddy," he would say, "that
father of yours doesn't appreciate you. He's too busy getting rich."

"Chickabiddy," was his name for little Sarah. Half of the name stuck to
her, and when she was older we called her Biddy.

She would gaze at him questioningly, her eyes like blue flower cups, a
strange little mixture of solemnity and bubbling mirth, of shyness
and impulsiveness. She had fat legs that creased above the tops of the
absurd little boots that looked to be too tight; sometimes she
rolled and tumbled in an ecstasy of abandon, and again she would sit
motionless, as though absorbed in dreams. Her hair was like corn silk in
the sun, twisting up into soft curls after her bath, when she sat rosily
presiding over her supper table.

As I look back over her early infancy, I realize that I loved her,
although it is impossible for me to say how much of this love is
retrospective. Why I was not mad about her every hour of the day is a
puzzle to me now. Why, indeed, was I not mad about all three of them?
There were moments when I held and kissed them, when something within
me melted: moments when I was away from them, and thought of them. But
these moments did not last. The something within me hardened again,
I became indifferent, my family was wiped out of my consciousness as
though it had never existed.

There was Matthew, for instance, the oldest. When he arrived, he was to
Maude a never-ending miracle, she would have his crib brought into her
room, and I would find her leaning over the bedside, gazing at him with
a rapt expression beyond my comprehension. To me he was just a brick-red
morsel of humanity, all folds and wrinkles, and not at all remarkable in
any way. Maude used to annoy me by getting out of bed in the middle of
the night when he cried, and at such times I was apt to wonder at the
odd trick the life-force had played me, and ask myself why I got married
at all. It was a queer method of carrying on the race. Later on, I began
to take a cursory interest in him, to watch for signs in him of certain
characteristics of my own youth which, in the philosophy of my manhood,
I had come to regard as defects. And it disturbed me somewhat to see
these signs appear. I wished him to