asures without the shadow of chaperonage,
which was, indeed, a thing still unheard of in Tuskingum.

In the expansion which no one else ventured, or, perhaps, wished to set
bounds to, she came under the criticism of her younger brother, who,
upon the rare occasions when he deigned to mingle in the family affairs,
drew their mother's notice to his sister's excesses in carrying-on, and
required some action that should keep her from bringing the name,
of Kenton to disgrace. From being himself a boy of very slovenly and
lawless life he had suddenly, at the age of fourteen, caught himself up
from the street, reformed his dress and conduct, and confined himself in
his large room at the top of the house, where, on the pursuits to which
he gave his spare time, the friends who frequented his society, and the
literature which nourished his darkling spirit, might fitly have been
written Mystery. The sister whom he reprobated was only two years his
elder, but since that difference in a girl accounts for a great deal, it
apparently authorized her to take him more lightly than he was able
to take himself. She said that he was in love, and she achieved an
importance with him through his speechless rage and scorn which none
of the rest of his family enjoyed. With his father and mother he had a
bearing of repressed superiority which a strenuous conscience kept from
unmasking itself in open contempt when they failed to make his sister
promise to behave herself. Sometimes he had lapses from his dignified
gloom with his mother, when, for no reason that could be given, he fell
from his habitual majesty to the tender dependence of a little boy,
just as his voice broke from its nascent base to its earlier treble at
moments when he least expected or wished such a thing to happen. His
stately but vague ideal of himself was supported by a stature beyond
his years, but this rendered it the more difficult for him to bear the
humiliation of his sudden collapses, and made him at other times the
easier prey of Lottie's ridicule. He got on best, or at least most
evenly, with his eldest sister. She took him seriously, perhaps because
she took all life so; and she was able to interpret him to his father
when his intolerable dignity forbade a common understanding between
them. When he got so far beyond his depth that he did not know what
he meant himself, as sometimes happened, she gently found him a safe
footing nearer shore.

Kenton's theory was that