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Updated: May 27, 2025
During those few minutes in the parlour a dozen tall candles had been lighted in the living-room, transforming the place that a moment before seemed so dreary. The dining table was opened to its full length and placed across the middle of the room, at right angles to the chaiselongue where Keith slept nights.
The living-room was dark, but the door to the parlour stood open, and light came through it. Not a sound could be heard for a few moments. Then his mother came running into the room and flung herself on her knees beside the chaiselongue. "Oh, my boy, my boy, my boy!" she cried over and over again as she pressed Keith to her breast, rocking him back and forth.
It was his one chance of feeling himself the physical equal of his schoolmates, and it was the only field of common endeavour outside the lessons where he was not made to feel his own inferiority. The insufficiency of one room as a living place for three persons had long been evident. Keith was in his twelfth year, and he still slept on the chaiselongue opposite his father's and mother's bed.
"I know," said Keith, nodding sagely. But he really did not know what fire meant until a few nights later. The whole family was sound asleep, Keith on the chaiselongue, his father and mother in the big bed on the other side of the room. While still half asleep he could hear his mother crying his father's name in a strangely agitated voice. Then he woke fully and looked up.
"Really, I can't see what you want with an old thing like me in here," she continued protesting as she was being led to her seat beside Keith. The girl sat opposite Granny, and the mother beside the girl, facing Keith. The father, on that one occasion, always occupied the chaiselongue at the short end of the table, with the mother on his right and Keith on his left.
An answer was received, negotiations progressed favourably, and soon Albert Mendelius, the son of a minister, was installed in the parlour with understanding that his use of it was exclusive only at night. In the daytime it was common ground for both boys, and Keith did his studying in there, but he continued to sleep on the chaiselongue.
"Oh, hell!" came back from the father. With that he half dropped and half flung the boy to the floor, so that the latter rolled across the room and landed under the chaiselongue. There Keith lay, still as a mouse, until he was pulled out by his mother. He didn't begin to cry again, and he was no longer scared or upset.
For a while he lay quite still, but with wide-open eyes and ears. The big lamp had been placed on the washstand back of the chaiselongue on which he was lying, evidently in order to prevent its light from falling on his face. His mother was seated, fully dressed, on the edge of the bed across the room. Her face was white as snow. Her eyes blazed with a sort of cold fire.
A double washstand, looking like a document chest in the daytime, the chaiselongue on which Keith slept at night, and the door to the best room occupied all the rest of that wall except a corner by the window, where stood his mother's high-backed easy chair, with the little work-table beside it and a hassock in front of it.
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