Mother Dear
But his mother, Beatrice Blaine! She was a woman!—by curious chance. Born in Boston of the old Puritan family of O’Hara, she was educated in Rome—also in Watertown and Ogdensburg, having been fired from three schools successively. She went abroad and was polished in Poland and finished in Finland.
She learned to smoke Camels in the Desert of Sahara and, at the Hague, to drink the national beverage, double strength. All in all, she absorbed a sort of education and an amount of liquor that it will be impossible ever again to find in this country.
In an absent-minded moment, she married Stephen Blaine, because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad and more than a little bit pie-eyed. He tried to keep step with her, but in less than a year cheerfully died. So Anthony was born fatherless.