The village is known for the speed of its gossip and the sloth of its intelligence. Those two factors explain the conditions which preluded and surrounded the dawn of consciousness in young Hugo. Mrs. Danner’s extemporaneous fabrication of a sturdy ancestral line kept the more supernatural elements of the baby’s prowess from the public eye. It became rapidly and generally understood that the Danner infant was abnormal and that the treatment to which it was submitted was not usual. At the same time neither the gossips of Indian Creek nor the slightly more sage professors of the college exercised the wit necessary to realize that, however strong young Hugo might become, it was neither right nor just that his cradle days be augurs of that eventual estate. On the face of it the argument seemed logical. If Mrs. Danner’s forbears had been men of peculiar might, her child might well be able to chin itself at three weeks and it might easily be necessary to confine it in a metal pen, however inhumane the process appeared.

Hugo was sheltered, and his early antics, peculiar and startling as they were to his parents, escaped public attention. The little current of talk about him was kept alive only because there was so small an array of topics for the local burghers. But it was not extraordinarily malicious. Months piled up. A year passed and then another.

Hugo was a good-natured, usually sober, and very sensitive child. Abednego Danner’s fear that his process might have created muscular strength at the expense of reason diminished and vanished as Hugo learned to walk and to talk, and as he grasped the rudiments of human behaviour. His high little voice was heard in the house and about its lawns.

They began to condition him. Throughout his later life there lingered in his mind a memory of the barriers erected by his family. He was told not to throw his pillow, when words meant nothing to him. Soon after that, he was told not to throw anything. When he could walk, he was forbidden to jump. His jumps were shocking to see, even at the age of two and a half. He was carefully instructed on his behaviour out of doors. No move of his was to indicate his difference from the ordinary child.

He was taught kindness and respect for people and property. His every destructive impulse was carefully curbed. That training was possible only because he was sensitive and naturally susceptible to advice. Punishment had no physical terror for him, because he could not feel it. But disfavour, anger, vexation, or disappointment in another person reflected itself in him at once.