At table he
talked but little. Though devotedly fond of his eldest daughter,
she was a puzzle and a stranger to him. His interests and hers
were absolutely dissimilar. The children he seldom spoke to but
to reprove; while Howard, the son, the ten-year-old and terrible
infant of the household, he always referred to as "that boy."
He was an abstracted, self-centred old man, with but two hobbies--
homoeopathy and the mechanism of clocks. But he had a strange way
of talking to himself in a low voice, keeping up a running, half-
whispered comment upon his own doings and actions; as, for
instance, upon this occasion: "Nine o'clock--the clock's a little
fast. I think I'll wind my watch. No, I've forgotten my watch.
Watermelon this morning, eh? Where's a knife? I'll have a little
salt. Victorine's forgot the spoons--ha, here's a spoon! No, it's
a knife I want."
After he had finished his watermelon, and while Victorine was
pouring his coffee, the two children came in, scrambling to their
places, and drumming on the table with their knife-handles.
The son and heir, Howard, was very much a boy. He played baseball
too well to be a very good boy, and for the sake of his own self-
respect maintained an attitude of perpetual revolt against his
older sister, who, as much as possible, took the place of the
mother, long since dead. Under her supervision, Howard blacked
his own shoes every morning before breakfast, changed his
underclothes twice a week, and was dissuaded from playing with the
dentist's son who lived three doors below and who had St.
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