He idolized his mother; they had a separate game for every hour and every undertaking of his happy day.  He climbed out of his crib, in his little faded blue pajamas, for uproarious tumbling and pillow-fighting every morning.  Then it was seven o’clock, and she told him a story while she dressed, and recited poems and answered his questions.  There was a game about getting all the tangles out of his hair, the father and mother tangles, and the various children, and even the dog and cat.  Then for months it was a game to have her go on washing Teddy’s face as long as he cried, and stop short when he stopped, so that after a while he did not cry at all.  But by that time he could spell “Hot” and “Cold” from the faucets, and could clean out the wash-stand with great soaping and scrubbing all by himself.

Then he and Mother went into the big dark kitchen, where Henny and Aurora were yawning over the boarders’ breakfasts, Henny perhaps cutting out flat little biscuit, and Aurora spooning out prunes from a big stone jar with her slender brown thumb getting covered with juice.  His mother stirred the oatmeal, and, if it were summer, sometimes quickly and suspiciously tasted the milk that was going into all the little pitchers.  Then they went upstairs.

The boarders had their meals at little separate tables now, and the “family,” which was Mother and Nana, and Aunt Adele and Uncle John, were together at the largest table at the back where the serving and carving were done, and where the big shiny percolator stood.  Teddy knew all the boarders—­old Colonel and Mrs. Fox from the big upstairs bedroom, and Miss Peet and her sister, the school-teachers, from the hall-room on that floor, and the Winchells, mother and daughter and son, in the two front rooms on the third floor, and the two clerks in the back room.  Uncle John and Aunt Adele had the pleasant big back room on the middle floor, and Nana existed darkly in the small room that finished that floor.  The persons who filled his world, if they went away to the country at all in summer, went only for a fortnight, and this gave Mother only the time she needed to have their blankets washed and their rooms papered and the woodwork cleaned before their return.

Of them all, of course he liked Uncle John and Aunt Adele best, as Mother did.  He had seen Aunt Adele kiss his mother, and often she and Uncle John would get into such gales of laughter at dinner that even Nana, even Teddy, in his high-chair, would laugh violently in sympathy.  All the boarders were kind to Teddy, but Uncle John was much more than kind.  He brought Teddy toys from Broadway, sombreros and moccasins and pails.  He was never too tired when he came home at night to take Teddy into his lap, and murmur long tales of giants and fairies.  And on long, wet Sundays he had been known to propose trips to the Zoo and the Aquarium.

Flanking his own picture on his mother’s bureau was a photograph of a magnificent person in velvet knickerbockers and a frilled shirt with a cocked hat under his arm.  This was Daddy, Teddy’s mother told him; he must remember Daddy!  But Teddy could not remember him.