e first of many like
steps soon to follow. The day after the Fair was late; but better to be
late than never. Really, there was hope for the Big Black Botch. More
and more he felt inclined to lessen still further its lessening
enormity. After all, this town was the town of his birth: and a
fundamental egoism cried out that it should be more worthy of him. He
recalled a group of American women--Easterners--whom, during his first
trip abroad, he had caught poring over the guest-book of a hotel in
Sorrento. He was the last male arrival in a slow season; he seemed
interesting and promising; evidently they had had hopes. "But," asked
one of them, "how is it you are willing to register openly from such a
town as that?"--and Raymond had felt the sting. "Such nerve, such
bumptiousness!" he said to me in recalling that query some years later.
But he did not add that he had tried to deliver any _riposte_. Instead
he was now to make a belated return at home, where effort most counted.
The years immediately to come were to be full of new openings and
opportunities; in his own way, and under his peculiar handicaps, he was
to try to take some advantage of them.

PART V

I

Little Albert's babyhood kept his mother a good deal at home--and by
"home" I mean the house in which he had been born. His father's lessened
interest in Europe (and his diminished deference for it) kept his mother
at home completely--and by "home" I now mean the town in which Albert
had been born. Father, mother, and offspring filled the big house as
well as they could--the big, _old_ house as it was sometimes called by
those who cherished a chronology that was purely American; and Albert
was more than a year and a half along in life before his grandmother
came across to see him and to inspect the distant _menage_. She brought
her water-waves and her sharpened critical sense, and went back leaving
the impression that she was artificial and exacting.

"She missed her Paris," said Raymond, "and her drive in the Bois."

"H'm!" said I, recalling that the town's recent chief executive had
pronounced us, not many years back, the equal of Paris in civic beauty.

"We have no Bois, as yet," he added, thoughtfully. "Do you think we ever
shall have one?"

He was revolving the Bois, not as a definite tract of park land, but as
a social institution.

"I think," said I, "that we had better be satisfied with developing
according to our own nature and needs."