After all, a conscience like that is a good thing to have at the bottom of a friendship.  I could be friends with a man of almost any religion, but hardly with a man of none.  Certainly the intimacy that sprang up between Talbert and me was fruitful in all the good things that cheer life’s journey from day to day, and deep enough to stand the strain of life’s earthquakes and tornadoes.  There was a love-affair that might have split us apart; but it only put the rivets into our friendship.  For both of us in that affair—­yes, all three of us, thank God—­played a straight game.  There was a time of loss and sorrow for me when he proved himself more true and helpful than any brother that I ever knew.  I was best man at his wedding; and because he married a girl that understood, his house became more like a home to me than any other place that my wandering life has found.

I saw its amazing architectural proportions erupt into the pride of Eastridge.  I saw Cyrus himself, with all his scroll-saw tastes and mansard-roof opinions, by virtue of sheer honesty and thorough-going human decency, develop into the unassuming “first citizen” of the town, trusted even by those who laughed at him, and honored most by his opponents.  I saw his aggravating family of charming children grow around him—­masterful Maria, aesthetic Charles Edward, pretty Peggy, fairy-tale Alice, and boisterous Billy—­each at heart lovable and fairly good; but, taken in combination, bewildering and perplexing to the last degree.

Cyrus had a late-Victorian theory in regard to the education of children, that individuality should not be crushed—­give them what they want—­follow the line of juvenile insistence—­all the opportunities and no fetters.  This late-Victorian theory had resulted in the production of a collection of early-Rooseveltian personalities around him, whose simultaneous interaction sometimes made his good old head swim.  As a matter of fact, the whole family, including Talbert’s preposterous old-maid sister Elizabeth (the biggest child of the lot), absolutely depended on the good sense of Cyrus and his wife, and would have been helpless without them.  But, as a matter of education, each child had a secret illusion of superiority to the parental standard, and not only made wild dashes at originality and independent action, but at the same time cherished a perfect mania for regulating and running all the others.  Independence was a sacred tradition in the Talbert family; but interference was a fixed nervous habit, and complication was a chronic social state.  The blessed mother understood them all, because she loved them all.  Cyrus loved them all, but the only one he thought he understood was Peggy, and her he usually misunderstood, because she was so much like him.  But he was fair to them all—­dangerously fair—­except when his subcutaneous conscience reproached him with not doing his duty; then he would cut the knot of family interference with some tremendous stroke of paternal decision unalterable as a law of the Medes and Persians.