That summer we sold the farm, mother being unable to work it with father never coming back. We also moved down to the Center. Mother happened to get a house near the Forges. So Nathan and I set our little feet upon the long journey that begins in vales of opal mystery and the wondertime of early childhood, winds pathetically through twenty years of fog while growing boys are groping to find themselves and hew their niche and accomplish their task, ... knows perhaps a few golden hours of life’s philosophic, sunlit afternoon, then ends in an afterglow of still greater mystery out behind the farthest star. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER II THE DRESDEN DOLL I Caleb Gridley, the girl’s father, ran the tannery in the larger town of Paris, twenty miles west of the Foxboros. He was a big-bodied, small headed man, with iron fists, a paving-block jaw and legs like telephone poles. Some of his words weigh seven to the pound and he did not secure them from his Bible, either, if he ever read his Bible. Mrs. Clementina Gridley, the girl’s mother, claimed she was related on her mother’s side to a duchess. Then to double rivet the exclusive ancestry, on her father’s side she had vague claims to a relative who had crossed on a certain well-known occasion to this stern and rock-bound coast, landing at Plymouth and marking the commencement of the antique furniture business. Mrs. Gridley was short and in upper contour resembled a barrel. She clothed herself and little daughter in purple and fine linen, and both of them toiled not, neither did they spin. She brought the first lorgnette to Paris, hung its first pair of sunfast overdrapes, called old Bill Chew, the colored man-of-all-work, the “coachman”, affected to be shocked when old Caleb blew his tea in a saucer and tried unsuccessfully to start a local aristocracy. These two—a mother with an ingrowing consciousness of her own grandeur and a father who endured it because he was too engrossed in making money to give his family much attention—were the little Gridley girl’s mental, moral and spiritual handicaps. More than one good woman’s fingers itched to paddle her; more than one good man would have counted it a special dispensation from Providence if he could have spent five minutes alone with her and thoroughly boxed her ears. But Bernie’s extremities were never paddled and Bernie’s ears were never boxed. At four, little Bernice was told she was made of better clay than the ordinary run of Eve’s daughters and at six she was sure of it. At eight she frequently mentioned the family “blood.” At ten she had queried Mrs. Joseph Fodder if “common children were not terribly coarse and mortifying” and “why did the Creator ever make the lower classes so disgustingly prolific?”