not
exactly stout; prematurely paternal, oddly willing to renounce the
fiercer joys of life, the joys of acquisition, of conquest, of youth.

"You'd better come home with me, Chickabiddy," he would say, "that father
of yours doesn't appreciate you. He's too busy getting rich."

"Chickabiddy," was his name for little Sarah. Half of the name stuck to
her, and when she was older we called her Biddy.

She would gaze at him questioningly, her eyes like blue flower cups, a
strange little mixture of solemnity and bubbling mirth, of shyness and
impulsiveness. She had fat legs that creased above the tops of the absurd
little boots that looked to be too tight; sometimes she rolled and
tumbled in an ecstasy of abandon, and again she would sit motionless, as
though absorbed in dreams. Her hair was like corn silk in the sun,
twisting up into soft curls after her bath, when she sat rosily presiding
over her supper table.

As I look back over her early infancy, I realize that I loved her,
although it is impossible for me to say how much of this love is
retrospective. Why I was not mad about her every hour of the day is a
puzzle to me now. Why, indeed, was I not mad about all three of them?
There were moments when I held and kissed them, when something within me
melted: moments when I was away from them, and thought of them. But these
moments did not last. The something within me hardened again, I became
indifferent, my family was wiped out of my consciousness as though it had
never existed.

There was Matthew, for instance, the oldest. When he arrived, he was to
Maude a never-ending miracle, she would have his crib brought into her
room, and I would find her leaning over the bedside, gazing at him with a
rapt expression beyond my comprehension. To me he was just a brick-red
morsel of humanity, all folds and wrinkles, and not at all remarkable in
any way. Maude used to annoy me by getting out of bed in the middle of
the night when he cried, and at such times I was apt to wonder at the odd
trick the life-force had played me, and ask myself why I got married at
all. It was a queer method of carrying on the race. Later on, I began to
take a cursory interest in him, to watch for signs in him of certain
characteristics of my own youth which, in the philosophy of my manhood, I
had come to regard as defects. And it disturbed me somewhat to see these
signs appear. I wished him to be what I had become by force of will--a
fighter. But he wa