outset, a crushing restraint upon the adventure from which it could never recover.
“I had rather call her myself,” he added, “when I have more time. I don’t know when I could see her now: it might be awkward calling at just this time.”
Later, while Uncle Bascom was poking furiously at the meagre coals of the tiny furnace in the cellar, setting up a clangorous and smoky din all through the house, Aunt Louise would bear down madly upon the boy, whispering:
“Did you hear him! Did you hear him! Still mad about the women at his age! Can’t keep his hands off them! The lechewous old fool!” and she cackled bitterly. Then, with a fierce change: “He’s mad about them, Eugene. He’s had one after anothah for the last twenty yeahs! He has spent faw-chuns on them! Have you seen that gul in his office yet? The stenographer?”
He had, and believed he had rarely seen a more solidly dull unattractive female than this pallid course-featured girl. But he only said: “Yes.”
“He has spent thousands on her, Gene! Thousands! The old fool! And all they do is laugh at him behind his back. Why, even at home heah,” her eyes darting madly about the place, “he can hardly keep his hands off me at times! I have to lock myself in my woom to secure pwotection,” and her bright old eyes muttered crazily about in her head.
He thought these outbursts the result of frantic and extravagant jealousy: fruit of some passionate and submerged affection that his aunt still bore for her husband. This, perhaps, was true, but later he was to find there was a surprising modicum of fact in what she had said.
During the wintry afternoon, he would sit and smoke one of his uncle’s corn-cob pipes, filling it with the coarse cheap powerful tobacco that lay, loosely spread, upon a bread-board in the kitchen.
Meanwhile, his aunt, on these usual Sundays when she must remain at home, played entire operas from Wagner on her small victrola.
Most of the records had been given her by her two daughters, and during the week the voices of the music afforded her the only companionship she had. The boy listened attentively to all she said about music, because he knew little about it, and had got from poetry the kind of joy that music seemed to give to others. Shifting the records quickly, his aunt would point out the melodramatic effervescence of the Italians, the metallic precision,
