only business!

My father's warehouse, too, lost its mystery as I grew older. For
exploring into its darkness I found that of course it did have walls
like any common building. The things in it, too, lost their wonder. It
was as though my father had packed all the rich and romantic Far East
into common barrels and crates and then nailed down the covers. And he
himself became for me as common as his warehouse. For in his case, too,
I could see the walls.

"I know you now," I thought to myself. He could sit through supper
night after night and not utter a word in his gloom. But the mystery in
him was gone. Business, nothing but business. A man and a place to be
let alone.

* * * * *

But it was my mother more than anyone else who drew me away from the
harbor. All through those early years she was the one who never changed,
the strong sure friend I could always come back to. My mother was as
safe as our house.

She was a small, slender woman grown bodily stronger year by year by the
sheer force of her spirit. I remember her smoothly parted hair, brown
but showing gray at forty, the strong, lined face and the kindly eyes
which I saw so often lighted by that loving smile of hers for me. If my
father didn't care for me, I was always sure she did. I could feel her
always watching, trying to understand what I was thinking and feeling.
As when I was very small she toned down the stories she read, so she did
in everything else for me, even in her religion. Though she was a strong
church woman, I heard little from her of the terrors of hell. But I
heard much of heaven and more still of a heaven on earth. "Thy will be
done on earth as it is in heaven." I can never forget how she spoke
those words as I knelt and repeated them after her--not so much in the
tone of a prayer to a higher being as in one of quiet resolve to
herself. To do her share, through church and hospital and charity work
and the bringing up of her children, her share in the establishment of a
heaven upon the earth, this was her religion.

And this heaven on earth of my mother's was made up of all that was
"fine" in humanity past and present. "Fine, fine!" she would say of some
kind deed, of some new plan for bettering life, or of some book she was
reading, some music she had heard, or of a photograph of some great
painting over in Europe. All her life she had wanted to go abroad.

My mother was one of those first American wom