Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/32

 HEN a woman housecleans her heart she usually goes clear to the attic. As I sat on that green-slatted park bench, accordingly, I did a heap of overhauling in the musty corners of memory. Something was wrong, and I wanted to find out where. So I took up my whole past life, and sat there turning it round and round, like a park squirrel with a peanut. Then I took it up in a more comprehensive way, as though it were a movie-film, and let it unreel, year by tangled year. My only trouble was in finding a beginning, for things in this world don't seem to have beginnings, but just flow into one another and shift and change and pass while life goes stumbling on and those little midgets called men and women crisscross one another's trails and wonder why they're so much more unhappy than they intended to be.

But on that park bench, as at every other time I got thinking about the past, I found myself marking the first mile-stone by beginning with Bud Griswold,