s
intimates, was the very picture of unconventional ease-taking as he
lolled in his chair before the kitchen stove, a cracker box half filled
with sawdust conveniently at hand.

As far back as his memory went Custer could recall vividly these Sunday
mornings, with the church bells ringing peacefully beyond the windows of
his modest home, and his father in easy undress, just emerged from his
weekly bath and pleasantly redolent of strong yellow soap, his feet
incased in blue yarn socks--white at toe and heel--and the neckband of
his fresh-starched shirt sawing away at the lobes of his freckled ears.
On these occasions Mr. Shrimplin inclined to a certain sad conservatism
as he discussed with his son those events of the week last passed which
had left their impress on his mind. But what pleased Custer best was
when his father, ceasing to be gently discursive and becoming vigorously
personal, added yet another canto to the stirring epic of William
Shrimplin.

Custer was wholly and delightfully sympathetic. There was, he felt, the
very choicest inspiration in the narrative, always growing and
expanding, of his father's earlier career, before Mrs. Shrimplin came
into his life, and as Mr. Shrimplin delicately intimated, tied him hand
and foot. The same grounds of mutual understanding and intellectual
dependence which existed between Custer and his father were lacking
where Mrs. Shrimplin was concerned. She was unromantic, with a painfully
literal cast of mind, though Custer--without knowing what is meant by a
sense of humor, suspected her of this rare gift, a dangerous and
destructive thing in woman. Privately considering her relation to his
father, he was forced to the conclusion that their union was a most
distressing instance of the proneness of really great minds to leave
their deep channels and seek the shallow waters in the every-day
concerns of life. He felt vaguely that she was narrow and provincial;
for had she not always lived on the flats, a region bounded by the
Square on the north and by Stoke's furniture factory on the south? On
the west the flats extended as far as civilization itself extended in
that direction, that is, to the gas house and the creek bank, while on
the east they were roughly defined by Mitchell's tannery and the brick
slaughter-house, beyond which vacant lots merged into cow pastures, the
cow pastures yielding in their turn to the real country, where the level
valley rolled up into hills which