If one advantage showed forth from a situation that seemed, in general, not altogether promising, it was this: Raymond, hearing his native town commented upon unfavorably by his wife,--who was keen and constant in her criticisms,--began to defend it. It was one thing for the native-born to pick flaws; it was another when that ungracious work was attempted by a newcomer. And he meant not only to defend it, but to remain in it, though his wife had married him partly on the strength of his European predilections, and largely on the assumption that a good part of their married life would be spent abroad. He even began to wonder if he might not join in and help improve things. Like most of his fellow-townsmen, he regarded the city's participation in the late national festival as a great step in advance,--the first of many like steps soon to follow. The day after the Fair was late; but better to be late than never. Really, there was hope for the Big Black Botch. More and more he felt inclined to lessen still further its lessening enormity. After all, this town was the town of his birth: and a fundamental egoism cried out that it should be more worthy of him. He recalled a group of American women--Easterners--whom, during his first trip abroad, he had caught poring over the guest-book of a hotel in Sorrento. He was the last male arrival in a slow season; he seemed interesting and promising; evidently they had had hopes. "But," asked one of them, "how is it you are willing to register openly from such a town as that?"--and Raymond had felt the sting. "Such nerve, such bumptiousness!" he said to me in recalling that query some years later. But he did not add that he had tried to deliver any _riposte_. Instead he was now to make a belated return at home, where effort most counted. The years immediately to come were to be full of new openings and opportunities; in his own way, and under his peculiar handicaps, he was to try to take some advantage of them. PART V I Little Albert's babyhood kept his mother a good deal at home--and by "home" I mean the house in which he had been born. His father's lessened interest in Europe (and his diminished deference for it) kept his mother at home completely--and by "home" I now mean the town in which Albert had been born. Father, mother, and offspring filled the big house as well as they could--the big, _old_ house as it was sometimes called by those who cherished a chronology that was purely American; and Albert was more than a year and a half along in life before his grandmother came across to see him and to inspect the distant _menage_. She brought her water-waves and her sharpened critical sense, and went back leaving the impression that she was artificial and exacting. "She missed her Paris," said Raymond, "and her drive in the Bois." "H'm!" said I, recalling that the town's recent chief executive had pronounced us, not many years back, the equal of Paris in civic beauty.