tormented by this queer need of describing his sensations. He remembered
very vividly one of the many occasions when it had roused his father's
anger. Dickie, standing with his hand against the cold bricks of The
Aura, smiled with his lips, not happily, but with a certain amusement,
thinking of how Sylvester's hand had cracked against his cheek and sent
all his thoughts flying like broken china. He had been apologizing for
his slowness over an errand--something about leaves, it had been--the
leaves of those aspens in the yard--he had told his father that they had
been little green flames--he had stopped to look at them.

"You damn fool!" Sylvester had said as he struck.

"You damn fool!" Once, when a stranger asked five-year-old Dickie his
name, he had answered innocently "Dickie-damn-fool!"

"They'll probably put it on my tombstone," Dickie concluded, and, stung
by the cold, he shrank into his coat and stumbled round the corner of the
street. The reek of spirits trailed behind him through the purity like a
soiled rag.

Number 18 Cottonwood Avenue was brilliantly lighted. Girlie was playing
the piano, Babe's voice, "sassing Poppa," was audible from one end to the
other of the empty street. Her laughter slapped the air. Dickie
hesitated. He was afraid of them all--of Sylvester's pensive, small,
brown eyes and hard, long hands, of Babe's bodily vigor, of Girlie's mild
contemptuous look, of his mother's gloomy, furtive tenderness. Dickie
felt a sort of aching and compassionate dread of the rough, awkward
caress of her big red hand against his cheek. As he hesitated, the door
opened--a blaze of light, yellow as old gold, streamed into the blue
brilliance of the moon. It was blotted out and a figure came quickly down