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 lingering shadow whatever! These things were sweet beyond measure, and precluded all regrets.

He became acquainted with his mother, and adored her. There were long conversations at bedtime, or in the dreamy afternoons, when they discussed things ethical, things psychological, things political, things obstetrical—any and every kind of thing. He found her mind a labyrinth for fascinating exploration, her personality endlessly beguiling. He took her to fly wild miles in the roadster, exulting in her sportsmanship, for she never cried out, never pressed the floor with an instinctive right foot, never clung frantically, frightenedly, to the side. He accompanied her to plays and gave her selected books to read, to hear what she would say of them, and was often surprised but never disappointed. She existed in his thoughts much less as a mother than as a sweetheart, a contemporary, a friend.

Two afternoons they spent apartment-hunting. The idea was Jock's. "No percentage in staying on in this house. Darn thing's too big! Why rattle around like a couple of bugs in a bucket? Let's sell it, and take an apartment in the city." It seemed feasible. A New York dwelling would be convenient to "the office" (so spake Jock, laughing at himself) and wonderfully convenient to Yvonne; and now that Mrs. Hamill's coterie had fallen in number from sixty to a nightly bridge-mad three, space was no longer requisite. So they hunted, and found what they wanted—eight livable rooms in an apartment house overlooking Central Park. They were to move the first week in April.

He had one fleeting burst of creative energy during this period, inspired by a group of his father's poems which his mother had dug from a trunk in the attic