Page:Firecrackers a realistic novel.pdf/232

 her direct gaze from his face. Gunnar's eyes, on the contrary, shifted away from this close scrutiny. At first, his speech was halting and low, but as his feeling for his narrative grew warmer, he spoke faster and louder.

Well then, he said, I must begin before I was born. My father, John Aloysius O'Grady is an Irishman and a most remarkable man. He married Beata Fuchs, an Austrian Jewess, who is an equally remarkable woman. Neither relinquished their religion. My father has remained a Catholic to this day, and my mother continues to observe the faith of her race in the synagogue. Singularly enough, in the face of this friendly disagreement in regard to their religious beliefs, they were able to agree on a much more difficult question, the rearing of their offspring.

My father had long since made the acute observation that whether children were brought up strictly or leniently by their parents the gods were ironically indifferent. One boy, prepared for all the pitfalls of life, fell into all the snares and traps he had been so carefully warned to avoid; another boy, reared in precisely the same manner, heeded the warning. Or, in the opposite instance, a lad, whose parents neglected to acquaint him with any of the perils of life, somehow managed, quite unconsciously, to walk around the danger spots and remain innocent until the day he died, while another, with an exactly similar background, spent his youth with