PART V
I
Little Albert's babyhood kept his mother a good deal at home—and by "home" I mean the house in which he had been born. His father's lessened interest in Europe (and his diminished deference for it) kept his mother at home completely—and by "home" I now mean the town in which Albert had been born. Father, mother, and offspring filled the big house as well as they could—the big, old house as it was sometimes called by those who cherished a chronology that was purely American; and Albert was more than a year and a half along in life before his grandmother came across to see him and to inspect the distant ménage. She brought her water-waves and her sharpened critical sense, and went back leaving the impression that she was artificial and exacting.
"She missed her Paris," said Raymond, "and her drive in the Bois."
"H'm!" said I, recalling that the town's recent chief executive had pronounced us, not many years back, the equal of Paris in civic beauty.
"We have no Bois, as yet," he added, thoughtfully. "Do you think we ever shall have one?"
He was revolving the Bois, not as a definite tract of park land, but as a social institution.
"I think," said I, "that we had better be satisfied with developing according to our own nature and needs."