nt you to face it and see what it is. Understand
it and then leave it, and then it won't follow you in the dark."

"Keep clean," she said. And understanding me as she did, I think she
added to herself, "And I must keep you quiet." She once told me she
hoped that when I grew up I might become a professor in one of those
college towns she loved, where I might work all my life in peace.

Although she never said anything to me against the harbor, I knew that
my mother put all the ugliest things in life down there. And the things
that were fine were all up here.

"I always like the front door of a house," she used to say, "to be wide
and low with only a step or two leading up. I like it to look
hospitable, as though always waiting for friends to come in."

Our front door was like that, and the neighborhood it waited for was one
of the quietest, the cleanest and the finest, according to her view, of
any in the country. The narrow little street had wide, leisurely
sidewalks and old-fashioned houses on either side, a few of red brick,
but more of brown stone with spotless white-sashed windows which were
tall and narrow and rounded at the top. There were no trees, but there
were many smooth, orderly vines. Almost all the houses had wide,
inviting doorways like ours, but the people they invited in were only
those who lived quietly here, shutting out New York and all the toots
and rumblings of the ships and warehouses and docks below, of which they
themselves were the owners.

These people in their leisurely way talked of literature and music, of
sculpture and painting and travel abroad, as their fathers and even
grandfathers had done--in times when the rest of the country, like one
colossal harbor, changing, heaving, seething, had had time for only the
crudest things, for railroads, mining camps, belching mills, vast herds
of cattle and droves of sheep, for the frontier towns my mother had
loathed, for a Civil War, for a Tweed Ring, for the Knights of Labor, a
Haymarket riot, for the astounding growth of cities, slums, corporations
and trusts, in this deep turbulent onward rush, this peopling of a
continent.

And because my father, crude and self-made and come out of the West, was
of this present country, he was an intruder politely avoided by these
people of the past. The men would come sometimes at night, but they came
only on business. They went straight through to the library, whence I
could hear my father's voice, loud