The visit did not justify all these forebodings.... The house was the same as Felix had remembered it, only smaller; the same boxes of moss-roses grew beside the door, and peacocks as of old screamed in the yard; there was a little porch, with a wild-cucumber vine trained up to screen out the light, and on that porch his father and mother sat, the Sunday morning of their arrival, in rocking-chairs, his mother reading a paper through spectacles that sat slightly askew, his father smoking a fat pipe.... They were not so old as he had in several years of absence begun to picture them; his father’s plump little body looked surprisingly sturdy, and there was a youthful humour in his mother’s smile as she sat talking, unaware of her son’s approach.... The first greetings over, Felix’s two aunts appeared from within the house—really old people these, Felix thought, but still wearing their air of aggressive self-dependence. They had looked after their little farm for so many years, without any masculine assistance except from an occasional hired man, that they resented, somewhat Felix thought, his father’s presence there, as a slur on their own capacity for taking care of themselves. They treated him a little scornfully, as if, being a man, he were a rather helpless person, and more of a nuisance than a help. He understood this, and smiled genially and tolerantly at their remarks, he being secure in the knowledge that it took a man to run things and that the real boss of this establishment was himself.... Just before they were seated at Sunday dinner, he led Felix to a cupboard, and smilingly produced a bottle of whiskey. “Have a little something to improve your appetite?” he asked. Felix poured himself a drink, and his father did the same, carefully raising the tumbler so as to let the light shine through the golden liquid, and smacking his lips after he had poured it down his throat—while Felix’s two aunts stonily ignored this masculine nonsense, and his mother looked on with an air of mild disapproval. At dinner they talked about the crops; his father was happy in being a farmer again; happy, after years of increasing uselessness in town while his children were growing up, in being master of a situation, the real head of a household; happy, and boyishly active, despite his spells of rheumatism, of which he also discoursed seriously and uncomplainingly. He had had a bad spell this last winter—in fact they had all been bothered with it—but they had found a liniment which seemed to do some good. “Pretty powerful stuff!” he said. “I sometimes wondered which was the worst, that liniment or the rheumatism—but it appeared to do the work!”