Mr. Snow was slim and tall, being, in fact, as his mother and sisters admiringly noted, six feet one, with long legs, narrow shoulders, and a small round face of such an open, infantile character that his mother often averred that it had changed in nothing since his babyhood, and that a frilled cap framing his chubby visage would produce the same effect as at that early stage. His name seemed to typify the purity of his nature, as seen through this countenance so fair and fresh, so blue-eyed and guileless, accentuated by the curls of light hair upon his round white forehead. Mrs. Snow was wont to discourse upon her William’s ingenuousness and his freedom from the usual faults of youth in a way that sometimes taxed the gravity of the listener, for, in point of fact, Billy was a young scapegrace whose existence ever since he was in short clothes had been devoted to mischief and levity as much as the limits of circumstance would allow. No one could tell how he had suffered from his mother’s exalted belief in him. She had forbidden him to play with naughty boys whose mischievous pranks he had himself instigated; she had accompanied him to school to point with tense indignation at the injuries he had received from stones thrown by playmates at whom he had had the first convincing “shy”; she had complained untiringly to parents by letter, by his sisters, and by interview, of indignities offered to the clothing and the person of her unoffending son. If Billy hadn’t been the whole-souled and genial boy that he was, he would have been made an outlaw and an object of derision among his kind, but it was an understood thing that, far from being responsible for his mother’s attitude, he writhed under it with an extorted obedience. A certain loyalty to his parent, and also the tongue-tied position of youth toward authority, made it impossible for him fully to state to her how far below her estimate of him he really was; he bore it, instead, with the meekness of an only son whose mother was a widow. The fact that he was a born lover and had been intermittently experiencing the tender passion since the age of seven, she regarded only as an additional proof of his gentle disposition. She would have liked him to be always in the society of girls instead of those rude boys.