“I have always understood my children perfectly,” contended Johnathan Forge to old Archibald Cuttner, when five years later Johnathan was having a hysterical time to keep Nathan from marrying his granddaughter. “Edith takes after her mother—fizzle-headed, irresponsible, neurotic, always thinking of herself and her troubles, inconsistent, a woman in every sense of the word. As for Nathan, God only knows who he takes after. I’m almost ready to believe him sent to me as my cross. I trained the boy by example and precept to walk uprightly, flee evil, honor and respect his parents, worship God. But he is determined to go his own way, regardless of my counsel. It’s partly the age in which we live that’s to blame. Disrespect and profanation is in the very air the rising generation breathes.” “I am persuaded,” wrote a popular clergyman recently, “that what this age needs more than all else is abstersion from the follies and ‘broad-mindedness’ of this blatant day; we need to return to the ‘good old time,’ the fundamental things,—unconditional respect for parents, rigorous observance of the Sabbath, the replacement of woman back in the home where Nature intended her to function; less frivolous nonsense and ‘isms’ in our educational systems and more reading-writing-and-arithmetic, good, old-fashioned fear of fire and brimstone thundered from our pulpits and a wholesome terror of the wrath of God injected into the hearts of a shallow and mocking generation who bow down and worship the Golden Calf.” “I hope,” remarked Uncle Joe Fodder, the town philosopher, one night when he and I discussed the Forges—“I hope the Lord’s got a sense o’ humor! How could He remain the Almighty without it?” IV The Forges, on coming to Paris, had taken a small gray cottage on Spring Street. This cottage stood on a corner with a short width of yard between the Adams Street sidewalk and the windows of the Forge dining room. And on summer nights when the heat required opened windows, neighbors and pedestrians overheard the full barrage of vocal artillery that husband and wife laid down over trivial family matters or the scion who was “bringing their gray hairs down in sorrow to the grave.” From the day he was born until the day he married, the boy seemed a bone of contention between his parents. For the most part these altercations had to do with his mother’s animosity toward the father’s method of raising his family. But always, when the man’s brutality got the better of hysterical argument, the affair ended with the wife’s contention, voiced in no very refined terms, that she “was going home to her mother.”