acquaintance of the family, for whom he had never acquired any considerable affection, he would grow bitterly shamefast if, while listening to the solemn drone of the minister, or the sorrowful chanting of the singers, he felt his face had assumed an expression of unfelt and counterfeited grief: as a consequence he would shift about matter— of-factly, cross his legs, gaze indifferently at the ceiling, or look out of the window with a smile, until he was conscious his conduct had attracted the attention of people, and that they were looking on him with disfavor. Then, he felt a certain grim satisfaction as if, although having lost esteem, he had recorded his life.
But Luke flourished hardily in all the absurd mummery of the village: he gave heaping weight to every simulation of affection, grief, pity, good-will, and modesty—there was no excess that he did not underscore heavily, and the world’s dull eye read him kindly.
He spun himself outward with ceaseless exuberance: he was genuinely and whole-heartedly involved. There was in him no toilsome web that might have checked him, no balancing or restraining weight—he had enormous energy, hungry gregariousness, the passion to pool his life.
In the family, where a simple brutal tag was enough for the appraisal of all fine consciences, Ben went simply as “the quiet one,” Luke as the generous and unselfish one, Eugene as the “scholar.” It served. The generous one, who had never in all his life had the power to fasten his mind upon the pages of a book, or the logic of number, for an hour together, resented, as he see— sawed comically from one leg to another, stammering quaintly, whistling for the word that stuck in his throat, the brooding abstraction of the youngest.
“Come on, this is no time for day-dreaming,” he would stammer ironically. “The early bird catches the worm—it’s time we went out on the street.”
And although his reference to day-dreams was only part of the axiomatic mosaic of his speech, Eugene was startled and confused, feeling that his secret world, so fearfully guarded, had been revealed to ridicule. And the older boy, too, smarting from his own dismal performances at school, convinced himself that the
