shout, "It's about this or that, Father.
He was saying ..."

When the group roared with laughter at a sally from one of them he would
smile uncertainly but amiably, glancing from one to the other in
complete ignorance of what had passed, but not resenting it. He took to
sitting more and more in his kitchen bedroom, smoking a comforting pipe
and reading and re-reading the evening paper. During that winter he and
Canary, the negro washwoman, became quite good friends. She washed down
in the basement once a week but came up to the kitchen for her massive
lunch. A walrus-waisted black woman, with a rich throaty voice, a
rolling eye, and a kindly heart. He actually waited for her appearance
above the laundry stairs.

"Weh, how's Mist' Minick to-day! Ah nev' did see a gemun spry's you ah
fo' yo' age. No, suh! nev' did."

At this rare praise he would straighten his shoulders and waggle his
head. "I'm worth any ten of these young sprats to-day." Canary would
throw back her head in a loud and companionable guffaw.

Nettie would appear at the kitchen swinging door. "Canary's having her
lunch, Father. Don't you want to come into the front room with me? We'll
have our lunch in another half-hour." He followed her obediently
enough. Nettie thought of him as a troublesome and rather pathetic
child--a child who would never grow up. If she attributed any thoughts
to that fine old head they were ambling thoughts, bordering, perhaps, on
senility. Little did she know how expertly this old one surveyed her and
how ruthlessly he passed judgment. She never suspected the thoughts that
formed in the active brain.

He knew about women. He had married a woman. He had had children by her.
He looked at this woman--his son's wife--moving about her little
five-room flat. She had theories about children. He had heard her
expound them. You didn't have them except under such and such
circumstances. It wasn't fair otherwise. Plenty of money for their
education. Well. He and his wife had had three children. Paul, the
second, had died at thirteen. A blow, that had been. They had not always
planned for the coming of the three but they always had found a way,
afterward. You managed, somehow, once the little wrinkled red ball had
fought its way into the world. You managed. You managed. Look at George!
Yet when he was born, thirty-nine years ago, Pa and Ma Minick had been
hard put to it.

Sitting there, while Nettie dismissed him as negligible, he saw h