It was a time when everyone was more alert for enemies than friends. Charley arrived at Sparcot some days after the Timberlanes, and in a dejected state of mind. His father had owned a small bookshop in a South Coast town. Ambrose Samuels was a man of gloom and tempers. When he was in his most smiling mood, he would read aloud to Mrs Samuels, the boy Charley, and his two sisters, Ruth and Rachel. He read to them from the thousands of obsolete theological books with which the second floor of the old shop was stocked, or from the works of obsolete and morose poets that sold no better than the theology. Much of this dead stock thus inevitably passed into Charley’s mind. He could quote it at any later time of life, without knowing who wrote it or when, remembering only that it came from what his father had designated as “a gilt-tooled thirty-two-mo” or a “tree’d calf octavo.” “All men think all men mortal but themselves; Themselves, when some alarming shock of fate Strikes through their wounded hearts the sudden dread.
