“No, that’s what I said, but Aunt Amelia just went wild when I did.  She said ... gee!” he passed his hand over his eyes with a gesture of mental confusion.  “Ain’t it strange what can go on under your eyes and you never know it?  Why, she says Uncle Grid was just like his father.”

The words were not out of his mouth before the other’s face of horror made him aware of his mistake.  “No!  No!  Not that!  Heavens, no!  I mean ... made like him ... wanted to be that kind, ’specially drink ...”  His tongue, unused to phrasing abstractions, stumbled and tripped in his haste to correct the other’s impression.  “You know how much Uncle Grid used to look like grandfather ... the same black hair and broad face and thick red lips and a kind of knob on the end of his nose?  Well, it seems he had his father’s insides, too ... but his mother’s conscience! I guess, from what Aunt Amelia says, that the combination made life about as near Tophet for him ...!  She’s the only one to know anything about it, because she’s lived with him always, you know, took him when grandmother died and he was a child.  She says when he was younger he was like a man fighting a wild beast ... he didn’t dare let up or rest.  Some days he wouldn’t stop working at his desk all day long, not even to eat, and then he’d grab up a piece of bread and go off for a long tearing tramp that’d last ’most all night.  You know what a tremendous physique all the Gridley men have had.  Well, Uncle Grid turned into work all the energy the rest of them spent in deviltry.  Aunt Amelia said he’d go on like that day after day for a month, and then he’d bring out one of those essays folks are so crazy about.  She said she never could bear to look at his books ... seemed to her they were written in his blood.  She told him so once and he said it was the only thing to do with blood like his.”

He was silent, while his listener made a clucking noise of astonishment.  “My!  My!  I’d have said that there never was anybody more different from grandfather than uncle.  Why, as he got on in years he didn’t even look like him any more.”

This reference gave Stephen a start.  “Oh, yes, that’s what all this came out for.  Aunt Amelia is just wild about this portrait.  It’s just a notion of hers, of course, but after what she told me I could see, easy, how the idea would come to her.  It looks this way, she says, as though Uncle Grid inherited his father’s physical make-up complete, and spent all his life fighting it ... and won out!  And here’s this picture making him look the way he would if he’d been the worst old ... as if he’d been like the Governor.  She says she feels as though she was the only one to defend uncle ... as if it could make any difference to him!  I guess the poor old lady is a little touched.  Likely it’s harder for her, losing uncle, than we realized.  She just about worshiped him.  Queer business, anyhow, wasn’t it?  Who’d ha’ thought he was like that?”