his paternal
spirit or instincts assert themselves. At table he talked but little.
Though devotedly fond of his eldest daughter, she was a puzzle and a
stranger to him. His interests and hers were absolutely dissimilar.
The children he seldom spoke to but to reprove; while Howard, the son,
the ten-year-old and terrible infant of the household, he always
referred to as "that boy."

He was an abstracted, self-centred old man, with but two
hobbies--homoeopathy and the mechanism of clocks. But he had a strange
way of talking to himself in a low voice, keeping up a running,
half-whispered comment upon his own doings and actions; as, for
instance, upon this occasion: "Nine o'clock--the clock's a little fast.
I think I'll wind my watch. No, I've forgotten my watch. Watermelon
this morning, eh? Where's a knife? I'll have a little salt.
Victorine's forgot the spoons--ha, here's a spoon! No, it's a knife I
want."

After he had finished his watermelon, and while Victorine was pouring
his coffee, the two children came in, scrambling to their places, and
drumming on the table with their knife-handles.

The son and heir, Howard, was very much a boy. He played baseball too
well to be a very good boy, and for the sake of his own self-respect
maintained an attitude of perpetual revolt against his older sister,
who, as much as possible, took the place of the mother, long since
dead. Under her supervision, Howard blacked his own shoes every
morning before breakfast, changed his underclothes twice a week, and
was dissuaded from playing with the dentist's son who lived three doors
below and who had St. Vitus' dance.

His little sister was much more tractable. She had been christened
Alberta, and was called Snooky. She promised to be pretty when she
grew up, but was at this time in that distressing transitional stage
between twelve and fifteen; was long-legged, and endowed with all the
awkwardness of a colt. Her shoes were still innocent of heels; but on
those occasions when she was allowed to wear her tiny first pair of
corsets she was exalted to an almost celestial pitch of silent ecstasy.
The clasp of the miniature stays around her small body was like the
embrace of a little lover, and awoke in her ideas that were as vague,
as immature and unformed as the straight little figure itself.

When Snooky and Howard had seated themselves, but one chair--at the end
of the breakfast-table, opposite Mr. Bessemer--remained vacant.