Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/177

 clothes and walked in a narrow, monotonous path in order that he might fulfil what he felt to bea sacred duty? Living herself in a state of chronic disappointment and chagrin, she badgered her son into a dull indifference, and underneath her apparent self-confidence was a mortifying and wounding conviction that he did not love her. When Anson returned from East Burnham that same evening, he did not go directly home. He went to his shop instead, closed the door behind him, lighted the gas, and fell to tinkering a pair of glasses that had been left with him for repairs. It was not the first time that he had sought refuge from unruly emotions in the exercise of his prosaic calling, but it was the first time that he had done so of a Sunday evening. He reflected, however, that his grandmother, Old Lady Pratt, always kept her Sabbath from sundown to sundown, and that what was a principle with her could not be a crime in her grandson. And so he worked away as industriously as though his daily bread had depended upon the immediate completion of that small job.

Meanwhile his face looked younger, happier, more animated, than it had looked for years, and no one seeing it would have guessed the nature of the errand from which he had just returned. He had gone that afternoon to consult his old friend upon his own condition; he had learned that certain strange and disturbing sensations he had experienced of late were the symptoms of a