For some time I had been expecting the man to come to see me and was curious concerning him. He was an American writer like Edward and myself and two or three weeks before he had gone to Edward pleading.... Well, he had wanted to see and talk with me. Another fellow with a soul, eh? And now there the man stood, with his queer old boyish face. He stood in the doorway, smiling anxiously. “Were you going out? Will I be disturbing you?” I had been standing before a glass adjusting a necktie. “Come on in,” I said, perhaps a little pompously. Before sensitive people I am likely to become a bit bovine. I do not wag my tail like a dog. What I do is to moo like a cow. “Come into the warm stall and eat hay with me,” I seem to myself to be saying at such times. I would really like to be a jolly friendly sort of a cuss ... you will understand.... “It’s always fair weather, when good fellows get together” ... that is the sort of thing I mean. That is what I want and I can’t achieve it, nor can I achieve a kind of quiet dignity that I often envy in others. I stood with my hands fingering my tie and looked at the man in the doorway. I had thrown the book I had been reading on a small table by the bed. “The devil!--he is one of our everlastingly distraught Americans. He is too much like myself.” I was tired and wanted to talk of my craft to some man who was sure of himself. Queer disconnected ideas are always popping into one’s mind. Perhaps they are not so disconnected. At that moment--as I stood looking at the man in the doorway--the figure of another man came sharply to my mind. The man was a carpenter who for a time lived next door to my father’s house when I was a boy in an Ohio town. He was a workman of the old sort, one who would build a house out of timber just as it is cut into boards by a sawmill. He could make the door frames and the window frames, knew how to cut cunningly all the various joints necessary to building a house tightly in a wet cold country. And on Summer evenings the carpenter used to come sometimes and stand by the door of our house and talk with mother as she was doing an ironing. He had a flair for mother, I fancy, and was always coming when father was not at home but he never came into the house. He stood at the door speaking of his work. He always talked of his work. If he had a flair for mother and she had one for him it was kept hidden away but one fancied that, when we children were not about, mother spoke to him of us. Our own father was not one with whom one spoke of children. Children existed but vaguely for him.