always neatly pressed ... and his neckties--he had them
hanging in a neat, perfect row, never disarranged. The ends of them were
always pulled even over the smooth stick on which they hung.

I can see my father yet, as he stands before the mirror, painstakingly
adjusting the tie he had chosen for the day's wear.

I was not at all like him. Where I took my knee britches off, there I
dropped them. They sprawled, as if half-alive, on the floor ... my
shirt, clinging with one arm over a chair, as if to keep from falling to
the floor.. my cap, flung hurriedly into a corner.

* * * * *

"Christ, Johnnie, won't you ever learn to be neat or civilised? What
kind of a boy are you, anyhow?"

He thought I was stubborn, was determined not to obey him, for again and
again I flung things about in the same disorder for which I was rebuked.
But a grey chaos was settling over me. I trembled often like a person
under a strange seizure. My mind did not readily respond to questions.
It went here and there in a welter. Day dreams chased through my mind
one after another in hurried heaps of confusion. I was lost ... groping
... in a curious new world of growing emotions leavened with grievous,
shapeless thoughts.

Strange involuntary rhythms swung through my spirit and body. Fantastic
imaginations took possession of me.

And I prayed at night, kneeling, great waves of religious emotion going
over me. And when my father saw me praying by the bedside, I felt
awkwardly, shamefully happy that he saw me. And I took to posing a
childishness, an innocence toward him.

Jenkins, the little stringy feed merchant, had two daughters, one
thirteen, Alva, and another Silvia, who was fifteen or sixteen.. and a
son, Jimmy, about seven....

It was over Alva and Silvia that my father and Jenkins used to come
together, teasing me. And, though the girls drew me with an enchanting
curiosity, I would protest that I didn't like girls ... that when I
became full-grown I would never marry, but would study books and mind my
business, single....

After this close, crafty, lascivious joking between them, my father
would end proudly with--

"Johnnie's a strange boy, he really doesn't care about such things. All
he cares about is books."

So I succeeded in completely fooling my father as to the changes going
on within me.

* * * * *

Though I had not an atom of belief left in orthodox Christi