.MTM5OA.MTIwODE3

me and I crossed out: were had been a grown-up person. When I got back to my mother in the car, I told her about the great honor that Grandfather had done me; she replied simply that he had evidently been moved and that anyway it was customary for gentlemen to rise when ladies came into the room. During the rest of the ride home, I thought about the cat abandoned on the hearth and the supper on the stove, and about my great friend, then young and handsome, trying to slip through the Confederate lines without being shot. And about the bronze statue of President Lincoln which crossed out: my friend he had helped to erect, at the feet of which I crossed out: had used to play while the nurses sat on the circular stone bench and gossiped with one another. Some years later, ^when I was a little older I came across a book on the statue of the library, written by Louis Couperus and entitled "Old People and the Things That Pass." My mother warned me that I was too young for it, but I read it nonetheless, in homage to my first