After Henrietta
Lebrune Patch had "joined another choir," as her widower huskily
remarked from time to time, father and son lived up at grampa's in
Tarrytown, and Ulysses came daily to Anthony's nursery and expelled
pleasant, thick-smelling words for sometimes as much as an hour. He was
continually promising Anthony hunting trips and fishing trips and
excursions to Atlantic City, "oh, some time soon now"; but none of them
ever materialized. One trip they did take; when Anthony was eleven they
went abroad, to England and Switzerland, and there in the best hotel in
Lucerne his father died with much sweating and grunting and crying aloud
for air. In a panic of despair and terror Anthony was brought back to
America, wedded to a vague melancholy that was to stay beside him
through the rest of his life.
PAST AND PERSON OF THE HERO
At eleven he had a horror of death. Within six impressionable years his
parents had died and his grandmother had faded off almost imperceptibly,
until, for the first time since her marriage, her person held for one
day an unquestioned supremacy over her own drawing room. So to Anthony
life was a struggle against death, that waited at every corner.
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