Keith’s head was still full of what he had heard when he went to bed that night, and he didn’t know whether to feel happy or unhappy about it.  His father had grown bigger and more interesting in some ways, and yet the boy’s chief impression was of a failure and a fall.  It was this impression that stuck most deeply in his mind.

XXI

Keith’s home was not one of those hospitable places with the doors always wide open, to which people are drawn almost against their will and from which they come away with difficulty.  Perhaps it was, above all, the spirit of the father that settled this matter.  To him, more than to any Englishman, his home was his castle, and he liked to keep the drawbridge raised against unwelcome company.  And most company seemed unwelcome, although at times, when the right persons appeared at the right moment, he could be happy as a child and unbend in a manner that made Keith gape with wonder.  When her good mood prevailed, the mother, too, was touchingly eager for the diversion provided by a chance visit, but when the dark moments came, she shunned everybody, while at the same time she watched any prolonged failure to call with morbid suspiciousness, ascribing it promptly to a sense of superiority toward herself and her family.  Granny was glad enough to talk to anybody, but she would never ask any one to call, and if no one came, she was apt to dig out some particularly bitter proverb, like “money alone has many friends.”

Both parents could be hospitable enough when occasion so demanded, but it was a formal thing with them, exercised only after due preparation.  In many ways, they were large-heartedly generous, but only in a serious manner, when actual need required it.  They might give freely beyond what they could well afford, but the father could be out of humour for days if some little thing regarded as particularly his own had been touched or used by another member of the family.

As it was, people came and went a good deal, but they came formally or because some specific errand brought them, and most of the errands, Keith soon realized, were connected with a desire for help.  The old women living like nightbirds in the garret, would drop in frequently, and almost invariably with some tale of woe that sooner or later drew from the mother relief in one form or another.  And one of Keith’s earliest tasks, half coveted and half feared, was to walk up to one of the attics with a plate of soup or a saucer full of jam or some other tidbit.  Others would come from the outside, and they, too, were mostly old women.  They always wanted to pat Keith, and he objected passionately to all of them.  His especial aversion was a gaunt old woman with a big hooked nose and a pair of startlingly large, sad-looking eyes.  She always smiled, and her smile was hopelessly out of keeping with the rest of her face.  The very sight of her made Keith forget all his manners.  Time and again his mother rebuked him and tried to bring him around by telling the old woman’s story—­a story of wonderful self-sacrifice and heroic struggle—­but it made no difference to him.  There was something about the sight of poverty and unhappiness and failure that provoked him beyond endurance, and sometimes he would turn to his mother with a reckless cry of: