, may have had more patience. He talked for years
about endowing some college, but never did it; when the time finally
came, he was far too deep in his financial worries.

James Prince, as I have noted, occasionally mentioned to Raymond his
conviction that he was wasting his time with all this scribbling, and
that so much work by artificial light was imperiling his eyesight.

"What good is it all going to do you?" I once heard him ask. His tone
was resigned, as if he had put the question several times before. "I
don't think I'd write quite so much, if I were you."

Raymond looked at him in silence. "Not write?" he seemed to say. "You
might as well ask me not to breathe."

"At least do it by daylight," his father suggested, or
counseled,--scarcely urged. "You won't have any eyes at all by the time
you're thirty."

But Raymond liked his double student-lamp with green shades. He liked
the quiet and retirement of late hours. I believe he liked even the
smell and smear of the oil.

His father spoke, as I have reported; but he never took away the pen or
put the light out. The boy seemingly had too strong a "slant": a
misfortune--or, at least, a disadvantage--which a concerned parent must
somehow endure. But he did take a more decided tack later on: he never
said a word about Raymond's going to college, and Raymond, as a fact,
never went. He fed his own intellectual furnace, and fed it in his own
way. He learned an immense number of useless and unrelated things. In
time they came to cumber him. Perhaps college would have been better,
after all.

I never knew Raymond to show any affection for either of his parents;
and he had no brothers and sisters. His father was an essentially kind,
just man, and might have welcomed an occasional little manifestation of
feeling. One day he told Raymond he had no heart. That was as far as
emotion and the expression of emotion could carry him. Raymond's mother
might have been kindly too, if she had not had herself. But a new
doctor, a new remedy, a new draught from a new quarter--and her boy was
instantly nowhere. Raymond's own position seemed to be that life in
families was the ordained thing and was to be accepted. Well, this was
the family ordained for him, and he would put up with it as best he
might. But I kept on developing my own impression of him; and I see now
just what that impression was going to be. Raymond, almost from the
start, felt himself as an independent, detached, i