vant after all. For some reason utterly beyond him, there was solace
as well as humiliation in the consciousness of a stigma, if such it be,
that attached equally to both his grandfathers, and not only to his
mother's parent. Then a new idea prompted a new question.

"Was Granny a servant when she came to Stockholm?"

"She was obliged to take service in order to live," his mother replied
very gently. "There is nothing about that to be ashamed of.... I have
known fine ladies who started in the kitchen. But, of course, one
doesn't like to talk of it to everybody."

Keith recognized the hint in her final words, but thought it needless.
He was already on his way back to his own corner, tired for the time of
asking questions, when he suddenly turned and said:

"We are just as good as anybody else, are we not?"

It was a phrase he had overheard sometime. Now it seemed to fit the
occasion, and it sounded good to him.

"There is the royal family," his mother rejoined enigmatically. "But one
of Granny's cousins was a lieutenant-colonel in the army."

"Where is he now," Keith demanded, agog with interest.

"He is dead, and--and we have never had anything to do with his family."

XIII

The inquisitiveness of Keith with regard to his ancestors and the past
life of his parents continued for quite a while. Other family
connections seemed unreal and did not interest him. Having no sister or
brother of his own, relationships of that kind were meaningless to him.
Parents, on the other hand, constituted a tangible personal experience,
and the presence of Granny taught that this experience was common to
grown-up people as well as children.

The curiosity he evinced was queerly impersonal, however, and might well
be called intellectual. The information he received had no power over
his own life. He could have been told anything, and he would have
accepted it calmly as something not affecting himself. The only thing
that influenced him was the manner of the person answering his
questions. To that manner he was almost morbidly sensitive, and from it
he concluded whether the various details related should please or
disturb him.

Instinctively he pressed his inquiries at points eliciting marked
resistance. And it was not what he actually learned, but the evasions
encountered, that produced the sensitiveness about his own backgrounds
which later often influenced his attitude harmfully at moments when he
most needed complete se