XVI

Ralph and his father came home to spend the holidays, and on
Christmas day Bayliss drove out from town for dinner. He arrived
early, and after greeting his mother in the kitchen, went up to
the sitting-room, which shone with a holiday neatness, and, for
once, was warm enough for Bayliss,--having a low circulation, he
felt the cold acutely. He walked up and down, jingling the keys
in his pockets and admiring his mother's winter chrysanthemums,
which were still blooming. Several times he paused before the
old-fashioned secretary, looking through the glass doors at the
volumes within. The sight of some of those books awoke
disagreeable memories. When he was a boy of fourteen or fifteen,
it used to make him bitterly jealous to hear his mother coaxing
Claude to read aloud to her. Bayliss had never been bookish. Even
before he could read, when his mother told him stories, he at
once began to prove to her how they could not possibly be true.
Later he found arithmetic and geography more interesting than
"Robinson Crusoe." If he sat down with a book, he wanted to feel
that he was learning something. His mother and Claude were always
talking over his head about the people in books and stories.

Though Bayliss had a sentimental feeling about coming home, he
considered that he had had a lonely boyhood. At the country
school he had not been happy; he was the boy who always got the
answers to the test problems when the others didn't, and he kept
his arithmetic papers buttoned up in the inside pocket of his
little jacket until he modestly handed them to the teacher, never
giving a neighbour the benefit of his cleverness. Leonard Dawson
and other lusty lads of his own age made life as terrifying for
him as they could. In winter they used to throw him into a
snow-drift, and then run away and leave him. In summer they made
him eat live grasshoppers behind the schoolhouse, and put big
bull-snakes in his dinner pail to surprise him. To this day,
Bayliss liked to see one of those fellows get into difficulties
that his big fists couldn't get him out of.

It was because Bayliss was quick at figures and undersized for a
farmer that his father sent him to town to learn the implement
business. From the day he went to work, he managed to live on his
small salary. He kept in his vest pocket a little day-book
wherein he noted down all his expenditures,--like the
millionaire about whom the Baptist preachers were never tired of
talking,-a