My mother, on the other hand, deplored his failure to exploit his Boston customers and said, with considerable truth, that if we moved across the bay to the city and opened up a shop there, we would really become rich. Then I could have as many pairs of shoes as Hopestill Mather and she could be driven about in a black car like Miss Pride’s. But nothing could avail against my father’s indolent pessimism, and he went on living in our poor little village precariously, like someone who, being exposed to the cold, finally quits the struggle to keep awake and sinks into what he knows is his last sleep.

For myself, I was torn between gratitude to Miss Pride for noticing us at all, for affixing her signature to letters to my father—letters bearing her address on Pinckney Street—and the knowledge that her relationship with us would never be anything but commercial. Nevertheless, my reveries of life in Boston persisted, became, indeed, as my experience widened, more specific and in a sense more real than my existence in Chichester. In the wintertime at school, I was known as a daydreamer and often my teacher would hustle me out of Miss Pride’s house with a mocking rebuke that made the whole class laugh: “Tell us what is so interesting that you can’t remember the capital of Rhode Island, Sonie.” At home, depending on the tempers of my parents, I was called “bright” or “stupid” or “silly” or “older than my age.” Confined during the day by school-room walls where hung Sir Galahad and “The Stag at Eve,” George Washington and President Wilson and Kipling’s “If,” plied by unanswerable questions, required to sing “I am a little blue bird” in reply to the teacher’s full, contralto query, “Who is a little blue bird?”, I would gradually float away, leaving my body behind, still sitting at the stained red desk. As I vanished, I would see the teacher jump to attention, gather her forces and in a moment overtake me, but not before I had slipped into Miss Pride’s drawing-room, wearing a brown velvet dress and a yellow bone round-comb in my hair.