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Between rows of syringa bushes that, notwithstanding weight of recent snow, and starkness of bare twigs, were faintly redolent of blossom scent from all the Springtimes of my childhood, a stone pathway led to the door.

I was less real to myself than the recollection of a plump little child who had run up that pathway; less real than the memory of a girl who had walked ever so sedately to conceal the fast beat of her heart, beside a man named Roger.

Father opened the door himself—yes, of course, it was eleven and the housekeeper and maid would be in bed. I kissed him, holding my breath to conceal the scent of my last cigarette in the cab.

“You are looking well, my dear.”

“So are you, father. How do you feel?” He was looking appallingly fragile and tired. We talked for a little, courteously, about Lytton-Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians,” and of how modern biographies were written with the dramatic pace of first rate novels. Then he told me that Nellie, the housekeeper, had said she would sit up to see me, and I climbed the curved stairway. It had a balustrade that had been fun to slide down, before I was fifteen and grew dignified when I heard someone say I was going to be pretty.

I left father sitting, reading William de Morgan’s “Alice-for-Short,” which intrigued him because it was a novel written by a man nearly seventy—and he had always planned to write a novel when the profession of medicine left him leisure. Father was past seventy, now.

I remembered while washing and freshening myself before I went to see the housekeeper, hearing that I had been because of my sex the greatest disappointment of my father’s life. And I considered, dispassionately the fact that he was not as aware of me, as a person; as he was aware of either of the women who had been his wives, women whose portraits hung in the long livingroom. I could not be as real to him as either of those women.

He grew up, finished medical college in a year when the man giving the Commencement address to the young doctors (address on “The Necessity of Keeping a Sense of Proportion”), illustrated it with the awful example of certain physicians who were going mad, contemporaneously, about things called “germs.”

Two or three years after, father and other impecunious young doctors in Boston pooled their small funds to import from Philadelphia one of these “madmen” who believed in germs, and had him lecture to them.

A man lives through so much and no more. Father had lived through years when Darwin and Huxley were gods of his young generation; through a grand passion for a wife who died young; through a felicitous second marriage with my mother, who was to him, probably, like a delightful young daughter. He lived to be a successful physician. He lived to grow old and tired—too tired to keep up his practice, except among charity patients who would have had most difficulty in finding a successor to him. It was unreasonable to expect him to have interest or understanding left for a daughter who had grown up in a generation which discarded the ideal of “service to humanity” for the working philosophy of, “let us enjoy ourselves by the way for the end may prove disappointing.”

He was polite to me; was sorry for the catastrophe of my marriage, sorry with the detachment of a man whose seventy crowded years have left him with no sense of importance in anything, save the problem, growing immediate, of—“and after death?” That was a problem that absorbed him the more intensely now, because his life had been too occupied to consider it.

In my childhood, a younger, more vigorous man that he had been, used to say to mother, that exquisitely dressed gay young figure that vanished before I was twelve, “Take the child to church—religion’s a great solace to women, and they need it in this world.”

That was a sentence vaguely remembered, with the sound of mother’s deprecating laughter, the odour of Eau de Violette, and light that came through stained glass windows so beautifully it made up for the heaviness of the preacher’s voice.

Nowadays, father urged me courteously to come home to live; and I knew that my presence in a household, slow-moving as his old footsteps, would be disturbing. I knew that he knew that, but felt it his duty to urge me. And I could not live at home any more; for I was not, even yet, sufficiently tired, or sufficiently old to live solely by remembrance.

I knocked on the housekeeper’s door.

Her name was Nellie. She came to us as cook thirty-eight years ago, the year father and mother were married. She came out of the Canadian backwoods, via three years in a German family, and four years in a French one, wherein she accumulated the technique of making complicated sauces and an impatience with alien (meaning non-Canadian-Irish) viewpoints.

They said she was a handsome rosy-cheeked slim girl, but she had weighed a hundred and eighty since I could remember. Four or five years after her advent, a housemaid, also named Nellie was brought in to help her. The two became known as Big Nellie and Little Nellie. They never got on. Mother said that they would get used to each other, but they did not—not in thirty-four years.

Little Nellie decided to retire (as father had written me some months before) and go to live with a cousin in Braintree. Four days after her retirement, she began dropping in for tea with Big Nellie, though there had never been an hour’s civility wasted between them. She confided that Braintree, a country town near Boston, was dull, and that the pastor of the church was not like “our own Father at home.” After a week, Big Nellie spoke to my father.

“Doctor,” she said, “I think you should ask the poor thing to come back. She looks very bad, and I’m sure she’s not getting enough food.” He did ask her back. She came forthwith; and, within six hours of her return, was quarrelling with Big Nellie as to whether or not she wiped dishes thoroughly.

Big Nellie’s public vocabulary, the one she used to father and guests, was most proper. Her private speech, used occasionally with me, since I postdated her arrival in the family by so many years, was more picturesque.

I knocked on her door. After an instant of being touchingly pleased to see me, she summed up the departure and return of Little Nellie.

“You know,” she said, “that devil I’m cursed with went away, but she came back.”

She was in bed, a huge brass bed she begged from mother thirty years or so ago, when brass beds went out of fashion. She had commanded supper, just “something light and tasty,” brought up to her by Little Nellie. In her large lap was a tray containing half a duckling, a pint or so of her own applesauce (made with cinnamon and lemon peel) a generous amount of oyster stuffing (tour de force of hers, stuffing duckling with oysters, and making the result delectable). On the tray, besides, were a quarter loaf of nut bread, two bottles of her home-brewed beer, and a large slice of apple pie.

She began by saying that her rheumatism was bad, and “the doctor” thought she should diet; but after all she had to keep her strength up to look after him. Then she told me I was thin, and should come home and have some proper cooking for a while. Afterwards, shyly, she asked about Peter, and “whether he’d got over his foolishness, and showed any signs of coming home to his own pretty wife, like a Christian.”

And I was carried back to years in my ’teens when she had probed to find the facts behind any of my misdemeanours at school, that she might stand staunchly between me and the anger of a maiden aunt who was determined I should not be “spoilt.”

She thought she might have distressed me about Peter; so she changed the subject. “You can have a cigarette in here, if you want to,” she said. “I know smoking doesn’t mean you’re bad, it’s just foolishness you picked up from that husband of yours.” She put her empty supper tray aside.

I lighted a cigarette, and walked about and examined the photographs that were the only decorations on her walls. Photographs and daguerreotypes. One was her brother and her lover, who “took the shilling” together some fifty years ago when times were hard in Canada. They died in some forgotten British border war, in Her Majesty’s colonies. The daguerreotype was a faded picture of two young men looking solemn and uncomfortable in old-fashioned regimentals.

Nellie stayed “faithful to a memory” apparently. Father used to tell me that, when she was young, he hoped she would marry because she was so mad about children. But, every “First Friday,” through forty years she had gone to communion for the repose of her brother’s and her “young man’s” soul. She often told me when I was a child, that she was happy looking forward to seeing them again in Heaven.

She had, besides their picture, photographs of mother, and of the babies who died, and at least eight of me because I was the last child and was “her” baby.

I walked about the room, regarding the photographs; and stopped, suddenly, before one I had not seen.

It was a mother-and-child picture, of me, looking very overwhelmed, and of that baby Patrick. I had forgotten about that.

When he was two months old, Nellie persuaded me to have his picture taken. The proofs of those photographs came after he was dead. I had never looked at them. I did not want to.

Her old voice was gentle. “You don’t mind my having that, do you, lamb? I found the proofs, and had them finished up; he was such a beautiful little boy.”

I threw my cigarette away, and hunted for my voice. “It’s all right,” I said. “That was a pretty dress he had on.”

“He’d be two years and two months old,” she said.

He was a picture of a baby with fuzz on his head, and a smiling toothless mouth, and unbelievably little square hands. His enormous eyes, and the length of his lashes, showed in the photograph.

I looked at it. There had been a year when I looked at babies in carriages in the street—most of them were fat and healthy but none of them had eyelashes that really curled like his. I had stopped looking at them, long ago.

“Nellie,” I said, “babies two years old can talk and walk, can’t they. What do they talk about?”

“Indeed they can talk,” she said. “I remember I taught you a poem out of a book, to tell your mother when she came back from a trip. You weren’t much more than two. It was part of ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ and you didn’t know what any of the words meant, but you said them off as nice—”

I stared at the photograph. Young woman who had been me—need not have been so bewildered, the baby was not a problem long. Baby in an absurd full frock—with his toes showing under it, if one looked for them carefully. His name had been Patrick. He used to feel warm to hold.

I had got over any grief for him.

And then, because I had got over losing him, and could not remember very well what he had been like, I went and sat on the edge of Nellie’s wide bed, and I cried against the cleanness of her cotton nightgown.

She patted my head, with rough old hands. “There, child,” she said. “You mustn’t sorrow over him. He’s a little angel in Heaven and I often think your mother must be glad to have him to keep her company. He might have grown to be a disappointment to you—and now he’s safe with God. In His own time you’ll see him again in Heaven. . . .”

The gentle voice was altogether cheerful. Heaven was to her as real a place as was to me the advertising department where I spent my days.

I grew calm, under the ineffably kind touch of her hands.

I wished that Heaven were real to me, and wondered why it was not, to me or any contemporaries I knew. The Victorians had been able to leave things to God—or the next generation. But the sound of guns and the knowledge of the immediacy of death and the desire to live as swiftly as possible, in the little time that youth and capacity to live swiftly, lasted—had got between that next generation and any whispering of angels. Perhaps that was it—it did not matter why, really—we had to get on without Heaven as best we could.

Nellie had found a way of changing the subject again.

“Patricia, I wish you could advise me. I’ve done something I think is very wicked.”

She had never done anything more wicked in her life than beg a prescription from father, for wine to use in making sauce madère.

“What is it, Nellie?”

“I’ve taken out naturalization papers.”

I did not see why that was wicked, but I thought it surprising; because father had tried for years to get her to become an American citizen, since she had lived in the United States most of her life, and had bought property here with her savings. She had always refused. “Forswear my allegiance to the crown my brother died for?” (that was just about her phrase,) “never!”

“How did you happen to do that, Nellie?”

She reached for a box, that held money, a rosary, a prayer book, and snapshots of her nieces in Canada. She extracted after some search, a newspaper picture of Al Smith, coming out of a Cathedral after his daughter’s wedding. She showed it to me.

“There,” she said, “doesn’t he look like a good pious father and husband? The doctor says he’ll be running for President next year, and I got naturalized so I can vote for him! He looks like an honest Christian, and I thought I should.”

She sighed a little. “I do feel dreadful though, because it’s as if I were throwing my allegiance in the face of my brother and that friend of his, in the picture over there. It makes them seem away off somewhere. That I should live long enough to give up my allegiance to the crown— Do you know, Patricia, if it had been in the Old Queen’s lifetime I could never have done it.”

“Nellie, Nellie,” I said, “the story should be captioned ‘Queen Victoria’s Death Gains Al Smith One Vote.’ ”

She did not understand me, but she smiled. “Now don’t you be making fun of me, child; it was a great difficulty I had, deciding. You go to bed, and rest, and I’ll send that Little Nellie up with your breakfast in the morning.”

I had a week-end of conversation with father about Massachusetts politics, and about his difficulties with the real-estate on which he depended for a competence, now that he was old, and retired from active practice; a week-end of too many and too elaborate meals thrust at me by Nellie, who produced in swift succession every dish I had been eager for when I was young.

Sunday afternoon (it was Nellie’s “day out” and Father was resting), I sat by a window of the long livingroom, and read “Vanity Fair” (Thackeray’s not Condé Nast’s), and had tea; and watched the dark grow. From that window I could look down the slope of Milton Hill, and see the reflection of the sunset dim on the icy river.

Roger had taught me to skate on that river, a lifetime ago, or the day before yesterday; some indeterminate time past. I thought about the Heaven that Nellie was so sure about; and tried to imagine Roger going on to be a statesman of some other country beyond that winter sky outside. It seemed conceivable. Perhaps it would seem realler some day, if I grew to be very old.

Meanwhile there was New York and the advertising business.

While a cab waited at the door, and I said “good-bye” to father, who was not well enough to go to the station, and to a wet-eyed Nellie, who urged me to write him more often, I wished I did not have to leave him.

Families—strangers who knew one well when one was a child.

In the cab, I lighted a cigarette, and wondered if Lucia’s train from Portland would connect with the five o’clock to New York.