Pickering had been, to my sense, a frigid
egotist, unable to conceive of any larger vocation for his son than to
strive to reproduce so irreproachable a model. "I know I have been
strangely brought up," said my friend, "and that the result is something
grotesque; but my education, piece by piece, in detail, became one of my
father's personal habits, as it were. He took a fancy to it at first
through his intense affection for my mother and the sort of worship he
paid her memory. She died at my birth, and as I grew up, it seems that I
bore an extraordinary likeness to her. Besides, my father had a great
many theories; he prided himself on his conservative opinions; he thought
the usual American _laisser-aller_ in education was a very vulgar
practice, and that children were not to grow up like dusty thorns by the
wayside." "So you see," Pickering went on, smiling and blushing, and yet
with something of the irony of vain regret, "I am a regular garden plant.
I have been watched and watered and pruned, and if there is any virtue in
tending I ought to take the prize at a flower show. Some three years ago
my father's health broke down, and he was kept very much within doors.
So, although I was a man grown, I lived altogether at home.
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