Grandpa and Grandma Scrimser had moved into Mapledale Avenue after Grandpa's first stroke. The house out at Crampton was too cold, and the Nordic help, always yearning for Euphoria or Swedenville, could not be persuaded to wait on a paralytic old man and his unwieldy wife. Lorin Weston had accepted the charge without a murmur: he was a great respecter of family ties. But the presence of the old couple had not made things easier at Mapledale Avenue. It was an ever-recurring misery to Mrs. Weston to have the precise routine of her household upset by Mrs. Scrimser's disorderly ways; she did not mind nursing her father nearly as much as "picking up" after her mother. But the crowning grievance was the invasion of her house by Grandma's followers—all the "inspirational" faddists, the prophets, seers, and healers who, having long enjoyed the happy-go-lucky hospitality of the Scrimser table, now thronged to Mrs. Weston's, ostensibly to pray with Grandma and over Grandpa, but always managing, as Mrs. Weston remarked, to drop in round about mealtimes.

Grandpa's stroke had come within the year after Vance's return to Euphoria. Vance had not seen much of Mr. Scrimser during the months preceding the latter's illness. Going out to Crampton was something the young man still shrank from. Everything in Euphoria, when he returned there from New York, seemed so small and colourless that he strayed about in it like a ghost in limbo; but the first time he walked out to see his grandmother, the old nausea caught him as he passed the field path leading to the river; and when his grandfather mounted the steps of the porch where Vance and Mrs. Scrimser were sitting, stiff-jointed but jaunty as ever, his hat tilted back from his black curls, his collar rolled away from his sinewy throat, the boy felt himself harden to a stone… . And then, one evening at the Free Speaker, a voice at the telephone had summoned Vance to the Elkington—and there in the glaring bar lolled the old man, like a marionette with its wires cut, propped on the sofa to which they had hurriedly raised him… .

The accident did not reawaken Vance's love for his grandfather, but it effaced the hate. If this was what a few years brought us to, the sternness of the moral law seemed cruelly out of proportion to the brevity of life; he acknowledged the grinning truth of the old man's philosophy. Hitherto Vance had never regretted having written, or sold for publication, the tale into which he had poured all his youthful indignation; but now, though he felt sure that no one at Euphoria had ever heard of The Hour, or would have connected his tale with any actual incident, yet he would have been glad to wipe those pages out of existence, and still more glad to blot from his memory the money they had brought him… .