ceased then all efforts to arrange a meeting to which he had looked forward with pride in his office of exhibiting each personage to the other.  But he was grieved toward his grandfather, becoming sharp and even disdainful to the queer, silent old man, at those times when the father was in the village.  He could have no love and but little friendliness for one who slighted his dear father.  And so a breach widened between them from year to year, as the child grew stouter fibre into his sentiments of loyalty and justice.

Meantime, age crept upon the little boy, relentlessly depriving him of this or that beloved idol, yet not unkindly leaving with him the pliant vitality that could fashion others to be still more warmly cherished.

With Nancy, on afternoons when cool shadows lay across the lawn between their houses, he often discussed these matters of life.  Nancy herself had not been spared the common fate.  Being now a mere graceless rudiment of humanity, all spindling arms and legs, save for a puckered, freckled face, she was past the witless time of expecting to pick up a bird with a broken wing and find it a fairy godmother who would give her three wishes.  It was more plausible now that a prince, “all dressed up in shiny Prince Clothes,” would come riding up on a creamy white horse, lift her to the saddle in front of him and gallop off, calling her “My beautiful darling!” while Madmasel, her uncle, and Betsy, the cook, danced up and down on the front piazza impotently shouting “Help!” She suspected then, when it was too late, that certain people would bitterly wish they had acted in a different manner.  If this did not happen soon, she meant to go into a convent where she would not be forever told things for her own good by those arrogantly pretending to know better, and where she could devote a quiet life to the bringing up of her children.

The little boy sympathised with her.  He knew what it was to be disappointed in one’s family.  The family he would have chosen for his own was that of which two excellent views were given on the circus bills.  In one picture they stood in line, maddeningly beautiful in their pink tights, ranging from the tall father and mother down through four children to a small boy that always looked much like himself.  In the other picture these meritorious persons were flying dizzily through the air at the very top of the great tent, from trapeze to trapeze, with the littlest boy happily in the greatest danger, midway in the air between the two proud parents, who were hurling him back and forth.

It was absurd to think of anything like this in connection with a family of which only one member had either courage or ambition.  One had only to study Clytie or Grandfather Delcher a few moments to see how hopeless it all was.

The next best life to be aspired to was that of a house-painter, who could climb about unchided on the frailest of high scaffolds, swing from the dizziest cupola, or sway jauntily at the top of the longest ladder—­always without the least concern whether he spilled paint on his clothes or not.