STRANGER. I met one of them in South Carolina—Axel Ericson—do you remember him?
RUDOLPH. I do.
STRANGER. One whole night, while we were on a train together, he kept telling me how our highly respectable and respected family consisted of nothing but rascals; that it had made its money by smuggling—you know, the toll-gate was right here; and that this house had been built with double walls for the hiding of contraband. Don't you see that the walls are double?
RUDOLPH. [Crushed] So that's the reason why we had closets everywhere?
STRANGER. The father of that fellow, Ericson, had been in the custom-house service and knew our father, and the son told me a lot of inside stories that turned my whole world of imagined conditions topsyturvy.
RUDOLPH. You gave him a licking, I suppose?
STRANGER. Why should I lick him?—However, my hair turned grey that night, and I had to edit my entire life over again. You know how we used to live in an atmosphere of mutual admiration; how we regarded our family as better than all others, and how, in particular, our parents were looked up to with almost religious veneration. And then I had to paint new faces on them, strip them, drag them down, eliminate them. It was dreadful! Then the ghosts began to walk. The pieces of those smashed figures would come together again, but not properly, and the result would be a regular wax cabinet of monsters. All those grey-haired gentlemen whom we called uncles, and who came to our house to play cards and eat cold suppers, they were smugglers, and some of them had been in the pillory—Did you know that?
RUDOLPH. [Completely overwhelmed] No.
STRANGER. The dye works were merely a hiding-place for smuggled yarn, which was dyed in order to prevent identification. I can still remember how I used to hate the smell of the dyeing vat—there was something sickeningly sweet about it.
RUDOLPH. Why did you have to tell me all this?