"The biggest books do, my boy." And to René's surprise and delight his father raised his voice and trolled out some verses that excited and exalted him. They were all about joy and freedom and the awfulness of losing them, but no single phrase bit into his mind to take possession of it. "Yes," he said, "yes." "Pooh!" said his father. "If we understood that we'd none of us be here, neither rich nor poor. We get a little excited about it, at least you and I do, but we can't go any further--not far enough into our own minds, I mean--and we are left weaker for the attack of all the things that drag us down and bind us fast. A little squeeze for bread and butter, and we say it doesn't matter, but may come all in good time. I used to be rather good at poetry, could remember anything I read or heard. Can't do that now. I used to love it. The Fourmys hate it. Lord! when I had my last row with my father, when he had said his say, I let fly at him with a page and a half of Milton and wound up with Shakespeare--you know: 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds----'" "I know," said René, though he had never read the Sonnets. "Lord! I was a young man, I was, and I went on being young for a surprisingly long time. It seemed there wasn't anything in the world could take it from me. But it came to an end at last. How you do make me talk, to be sure! I wish you'd tell me about yourself." That shut René up completely. There was nothing to tell, nothing that would not dwindle and shrivel up in the telling. There was such mockery in this disturbing father of his that his timid little emotions, his shy desire to think well of him, to like him, to set what he found in him against what he knew and had heard, hid away, curled up in his mind and created a horrid congestion. But his father had a certain fascination for him, and it was a relief to get him to talk. He never did learn why the Fourmys, rich and poor, were fixed where they were in the middle-class of Thrigsby, but he did get flashes and sparks which promised elucidation, and he did begin to discover that there were worlds on worlds outside, and minds which were not afraid of thought and not wholly set on money and the good opinion of others. It was a painful mystery to him that his father's mind should lead him on so far, give him a shining promise of beauty--though beauty was the very last word that in his shyness of himself he would have used--and then by a cruel sleight of hand present him only with caricatures of Fourmys and neighbors and George. Mr. Fourmy on his elder son is worth quoting. He said: "George is a reg'lar Fourmy, a thorough Unitarian. They want one God. George desires to live in the worship of the one flesh." He seemed to like George, was often at The Nest, and when George and Elsie came to them there was tapped in the queer man a vein of ribaldry which made René, even as he laughed, blush that such things could be said before a woman. George said of his father: