“Got any brothers or sisters?” I finally demanded.
“Yeah. I gotta sister.”
“Pshaw! How old?”
“Four. But she ain’t no good—only to tag ’round and squeal to Ma when I skip my chores.”
“Sure. I know. Girls always spoil everything. Ain’t it awful?”
“Awful’s no name for it,” agreed Nathan.
II
I learned other things of Nathan regarding his family that morning and in the day and week ensuing.
The Forges had a cow, a grievance against the selectmen, a hard time to get along and a mortgage. Nathan’s mother was five years older than his father. The latter had once aspired to be a minister. A premature marriage, however, had sent him to the humbler calling of tapping and heeling shoes. Along with farming in a small way to help out with domestic expenses, Johnathan Forge now proposed to cobble shoes at his new residence in East Foxboro.
On his father’s side the boy’s ancestry was English,—that bigoted, Quilpish English which contends that a man’s wife and children are his personal chattels and foot-scrapers. A neurasthenic Yankee wife resented the absurdity but was too weak-charactered to do much more than scream about it. It puzzled me in those days to hear him orate to my father about “every man’s house being his castle.” I could never discern evidences of a “castle” about the flat-roofed, drab-colored, hillside home for which Johnathan had paid the Browns five hundred dollars. Nevertheless, he ran his castle as he pleased, and all the neighbors could do was shrug their individual and collective shoulders and mind their own business.