al
grandfather, from whom, otherwise, he might have elicited some more
satisfactory information.

Both grandfathers were dead long before Keith was born. He never saw a
portrait of either of them, or had an idea of how they looked. He could
not even recall having heard their Christian names. The personality of
his paternal grandfather always remained a total blank to him. Of the
other one he knew a little more. The fashionable club where his mother's
father served was notorious for its conviviality and reckless gambling,
and the men were like the masters to some extent. This one of his
grandfathers used to love wine, women, cards and everything else that
helped to modify life's general drabness. He must have been something of
a wit, too, in his own circles, having any number of boon companions.
Keith never heard what kind of a man he was at home. He made good money
while he lived and spent it as carelessly as he earned it. At forty-two
he died, leaving a penniless widow to look after a daughter still in her
early teens. Keith's paternal grandfather died in the same way, but his
widow, who was a hard-headed little woman of old peasant stock--the best
in Sweden--did better with four children than the other grandmother
with one.

There were gaps in the stories of his mother and Granny concerning which
he never got a direct reply from them, but by degrees he picked up many
missing details from other sources. What he learned in this way
indicated merely that they had been very poor at times, and poverty had
forced them to earn a living by work that was quite honest and decent,
but not "socially respectable." At one time, before her daughter was old
enough to assume a share of the burden, Granny had actually had to fall
back on the coarsest and humblest menial work--scrubbing and washing by
the day in strange houses. Yet she and her daughter appeared throughout
that ordeal to have remained on terms of pleasant intimacy with friends
of the class to which they regarded themselves as properly belonging.

Another problem never solved for Keith was what kind of schooling his
mother had had. Her own failure to tell suggested that it must have been
of the slightest. Yet Keith never thought of her as ignorant. She had a
bright, eager mind that, when not clouded, acted as a goad on his own.
It was she who taught him to read and filled him with an awe for books
and book-learning that was, perhaps, not entirely wholesome. She herself