and raw potatoes—for he had the full strength of his family’s mania concerning food, violent prejudices about its preparation, and deep-seated distrust of everybody’s cleanliness but his own.
“Have some, my boy. Have some!” he would yell huskily, seating himself and lunging toward Eugene with the awful mess, in a gesture of violent invitation.
“Thank you, no.” Eugene would try to keep his eyes averted from the mess and focus on the good food heaping his plate.
“You may eat that slop if you want to,” Uncle Bascom would exclaim with a scornful and sneering laugh. “It would give me my death of dyspepsia.” And the silence of their eating would be broken by the recurrent snuffling whoops of Aunt Louise, accompanied by many pitying looks and head-shakes as she trembled with laughter and hid her mouth.
Or, suddenly, in the full rich progress of the meal, Eugene would be shocked out of his pleasure in the food by the mad bright eyes of Aunt Louise bearing fiercely down upon him:
“Eugene!—don’t bwood, boy! Don’t bwood! You’ve got it in you—it’s in the blood! You’re one of them. You’re one of them!—a Pentland,” she croaked fatally.
“Ah-h—you don’t know what you’re talking about”—thus suddenly in fierce distemper Uncle Bascom. “Scotch! Scotch-Irish! Finest people on earth! No question about it whatever.”
“Fugitive ideation! Fugitive ideation!” she chattered like a monkey over a nut. “Mind goes off in all diwections. Can’t stick to anything five minutes at a time. The same thing that’s wong with the moduhn decadents. Wead Nordau’s book, Eugene. It will open yoah eyes,” and she whispered hoarsely again: “You’re ovah-sexed—all of you!”
“Bosh! Bosh!” growled Uncle Bascom. “Some more of your psychology—the bastard of superstition and quackery: the black magic of little minds—the effort of a blind man (phuh! phuh! phuh!) crawling about in a dark room (phuh! phuh!) looking for a black cat (phuh! phuh!) that isn’t there,” he yelled triumphantly, and closed his eyes and snarled and snuffled down his nose with laughter.
He knew nothing about it: occasionally he still read Kant, and he could be as deep in absolute categories, moments of negation, and definitions of a concept as she with all of her complicated and extensive paraphernalia of phobias, complexes, fixations, and repressions.
“Well, Eugene,” thus Aunt Louise with light raillery and yet with eager curiosity, “have you found you a nice wosy-cheeked New England gul
