But if everyone else were out of temper, there was always one person he could be sure of finding the same, and that was John-James—­good, kind, reliable John-James, whom he adored.  Did he want a boat made?  John-James would do it with those big hands which looked so clumsy and were so sure and careful.  Had he broken the rope reins with which he and Jacka’s John-Willy played at horses?  John-James would mend them.  All of kindness and consideration to be found for him in that house he extracted from John-James.  One thing only he could not get even from him, and that was a return of his deep devotion.  This was not because of any bitter feeling in the elder boy’s heart.  Ishmael had done him no harm, and he bore him no grudge; neither, since he was not an admirer of his elder brother Archelaus, did he take up his cause.  It simply was that John-James was not made for the emotions.  He knew nothing about them and they made him uncomfortable.  For a long while Ishmael failed to discover this.  He flung himself upon John-James, and felt him satisfactorily solid and worried no more on the matter.  But when, in the natural course of development, his mind began to feel pain as well as discomfort at the chill which met him from his family, he turned to his sure support for help in this also, he found a blank.  John-James would take him fishing, save his pastry for him, stand between him and harshness, but he would not, because he could not, give him love to live on.  If he had one outward-flowing sensation it was towards his sister Vassilissa.  Ishmael was just the “lil’ un” and a trouble because the cause of trouble, but Vassie was something so infinitely quicker, cleverer, more elusive than himself that she stood to John-James for what of beauty was interwoven with the very everyday stuff of his life.  She, like Ishmael, was at the intensely personal period, though with her it took objective form in dress and pleasures rather than in the subjective wonderings of her youngest brother.  As to John-James, he hardly entered into the fabric of her existence.  Life to her was the cat-like attempt to get as much comfort as possible regardless of others.  The only emotion Ishmael obtained out of Cloom came from Katie Jacka, and that was rather unhealthy, because furtive and sentimental, and he only detested it.  As to his mother, that hectic, uneven creature, she was to him a loud-voiced person of tempers and tendernesses equally gusty, not a being as much “I” to herself as he was to himself.  It was only on the day following the supper party that he began to be affected by her as a violent personality.