d but
carry on the experience of the race. But to ask audience of me, to come
and look me in the eye, to say you wanted my advice on a pressing
matter, that I think marks almost a new phase in the long developing
history of father and son. And your account of the fracas struck me as
quite reasonably frank and honest. "I didn't seem able," you observed,
"not to go on being badder and badder."

We discussed the difficulties of our situation, and you passed sentence
upon yourself. I saw to it that the outraged dignity of Mademoiselle
Potin was mocked by no mere formality of infliction. You did your best
to be stoical, I remember, but at last you yelped and wept. Then,
justice being done, you rearranged your costume. The situation was a
little difficult until you, still sobbing and buttoning--you are really
a shocking bad hand at buttons--and looking a very small, tender,
ruffled, rueful thing indeed, strolled towards my study window. "The
pear tree is out next door," you remarked, without a trace of animosity,
and sobbing as one might hiccough.

I suppose there are moments in the lives of all grown men when they come
near to weeping aloud. In some secret place within myself I must have
been a wild river of tears. I answered, however, with the same admirable
detachment from the smarting past that you had achieved, that my study
window was particularly adapted to the appreciation of our neighbor's
pear tree, because of its height from the ground. We fell into a
conversation about blossom and the setting of fruit, kneeling together
upon my window-seat and looking up into the pear tree against the sky,
and then down through its black branches into the gardens all
quickening with spring. We were on so friendly a footing when presently
Mademoiselle Potin returned and placed her dignity or her resignation in
my hands, that I doubt if she believed a word of all my assurances until
the unmistakable confirmation of your evening bath. Then, as I
understood it, she was extremely remorseful to you and indignant against
my violence....

But when I knelt with you, little urchin, upon my window-seat, it came
to me as a thing almost intolerably desirable that some day you should
become my real and understanding friend. I loved you profoundly. I
wanted to stretch forward into time and speak to you, man myself to the
man you are yet to be. It seemed to me that between us there must needs
be peculiar subtleties of sympathy. And I remembere