As I look back over her early infancy, I realize that I loved her, although it is impossible for me to say how much of this love is retrospective.  Why I was not mad about her every hour of the day is a puzzle to me now.  Why, indeed, was I not mad about all three of them?  There were moments when I held and kissed them, when something within me melted:  moments when I was away from them, and thought of them.  But these moments did not last.  The something within me hardened again, I became indifferent, my family was wiped out of my consciousness as though it had never existed.

There was Matthew, for instance, the oldest.  When he arrived, he was to Maude a never-ending miracle, she would have his crib brought into her room, and I would find her leaning over the bedside, gazing at him with a rapt expression beyond my comprehension.  To me he was just a brick-red morsel of humanity, all folds and wrinkles, and not at all remarkable in any way.  Maude used to annoy me by getting out of bed in the middle of the night when he cried, and at such times I was apt to wonder at the odd trick the life-force had played me, and ask myself why I got married at all.  It was a queer method of carrying on the race.  Later on, I began to take a cursory interest in him, to watch for signs in him of certain characteristics of my own youth which, in the philosophy of my manhood, I had come to regard as defects.  And it disturbed me somewhat to see these signs appear.  I wished him to be what I had become by force of will—­a fighter.  But he was a sensitive child, anxious for approval; not robust, though spiritual rather than delicate; even in comparative infancy he cared more for books than toys, and his greatest joy was in being read to.  In spite of these traits—­perhaps because of them—­there was a sympathy between us.  From the time that he could talk the child seemed to understand me.  Occasionally I surprised him gazing at me with a certain wistful look that comes back to me as I write.

Moreton, Tom used to call Alexander the Great because he was a fighter from the cradle, beating his elder brother, too considerate to strike back, and likewise—­when opportunity offered—­his sister; and appropriating their toys.  A self-sufficient, doughty young man, with the round head that withstands many blows, taking by nature to competition and buccaneering in general.  I did not love him half so much as I did Matthew—­if such intermittent emotions as mine may be called love.  It was a standing joke of mine—­which Maude strongly resented—­that Moreton resembled Cousin George of Elkington.