I tore up the telegram, sent back the letter without opening it. You are denouncing me as inhuman, gentle reader. Perhaps you are right. But permit me to point out to you that, if I had not in my composition a vein of iron, I should never have risen from the mosquito-haunted flats of the Passaic. Also, gentle reader, if I had been a man of the ordinary sort would Mary Kirkwood have been sufficiently interested in me to send those letters and that telegram? A day or so after the return of her last letter I was seized--I can’t say why--with a longing to see my father and mother and sister, on that lonely farm out in New Jersey. I had never felt that desire since I first left home, but had made my few and brief visits out of a sense of duty--no, of shame. The thought of them gave me no sensation of horror, as it gave Edna and her daughter. When I remembered them it was simply as one remembers any random fact. They did not understand me; and in them there was nothing to understand. We had few subjects for conversation, and those not wildly interesting and soon exhausted. You will smile when I say I loved them. Yet it is the truth. We do not always love those we like to be with; we do not always like to be with those we love. There was nothing to detain me in Paris. The hours hung like guests who do not know how to take leave. So not many days elapsed between my seizure and my appearance at the spacious and comfortable stone farmhouse where the four old people were awaiting in a semi-comatose or dozing state what they firmly believed was a summons to a higher life. Their belief in it, like that of most religious people, was not strong enough to make them impatient to get it; still they believed, and found the belief a satisfactory way of employing such small part of their minds as remained awake. I had not seen them or their place in several years, so I was astonished by the changes. My sister Polly--a homely old maid--and Edna’s father had some glimmerings of enterprise. Polly took in and read several magazines, and from them gathered odds and ends of up-to-date ideas about dress, about furnishing, about gardens. With the valuable assistance of old Weeping Willie she had wrought a most creditable transformation. The old people now “looked like something,” as the saying is. And the place had a real smartness--both within and without. Polly--she was about eight years my senior, but looked old enough to be my mother--Polly watched me anxiously as I strolled and nosed about. My delight filled her with delight. “You’re not so ashamed of us, perhaps?” said she. “I never have been,” replied I. Nor did I put an accent on the personal pronoun that would have been a hint about somebody else’s feelings. “Well--you ought to have been,” said she. “We were mighty far behind even the tail of the procession.”