"You see what I did then, Jane, is something you will perhaps find yourself doing some day and that it may be inevitable everyone does." He reached forward and taking his daughter's bare foot in his hand drew it to him and kissed it. Then he sat quickly upright holding his knees in his arms. Something like a blush came swiftly over his daughter's face and then she began to look at him with very serious puzzled eyes. He smiled gaily. He began to talk.

"And so you see, there I was, living right here in this very town and that girl to whom I had proposed marriage had gone away and I had heard nothing more from her. She only stayed at my friend's house a day or two after I had managed to make the beginning of her visit such a startling affair.

"For a long time my father had been scolding at me because I had taken no special interest in the washing machine factory it was supposed I was after his day to take hold of and run, and so I decided I had better do a thing called 'settling down.' That is to say, I made up my mind it would be better for me if I gave myself less to dreams and to the kind of gawky youthfulness that only led to my doing such unaccountable things as that second running into that naked woman's presence.

"The truth is, of course, that my father, who in his own youth had come to a day when he had made just such another decision as I was then making, that he, for all his settling down and becoming a hard working sensible man, hadn't got very much for it; but I didn't think of that at the time. Well, he wasn't such a gay old dog as I remember him now. He had always worked pretty hard, I suppose, and every day he sat for eight or ten hours at his desk and through all the years I had known him he had been subject to attacks of indigestion, during which everyone in our house had to go softly about for fear of making his head ache worse than it did. The attacks used to come on about once a month and he would come home, and mother would fix him up on a couch in our front room, and she used to heat fiat-irons and roll them in towels and put them on his belly, and there he would lie all day groaning, and as you may suppose, making the life of our house a gay festive affair.

"And then, when he got all right again and only looked a little grey and drawn he would come sit at the table at meal-time with the rest of us and would talk to me about his life, as an entirely successful affair, and take it for granted I wanted just such another life.

"For some fool reason, I don't understand now, I thought then that was just what I did want. I suppose all the time I must have wanted something else and that made me spend so much of my time having vague dreams, but not only father, but all the older men in our town and perhaps in all the other towns along the railroad east and west were thinking and talking just that same way to their sons and I suppose I got caught up by the general drift of thinking and just went into it blind, with my head down, not thinking at all.