Years of Discretion

and her husband had moved after their marriage. That serenity of existence was the off-spring of generations of repression. No Howard ever confessed to anything so interesting as excitement. Emotion of every sort had been added to the biblical list of deadly sins in that serene and practical family. For twenty years Farrell Howard, Sr., left the Brook- line house at the same hour in the morning and returned as punctually at an unvarying hour in the evening. His father had been one of the successful New Englanders in the East India trade and he had turned his inheritance over many times by judicious investments in city and suburban real estate. Farrell Howard, Jr., literally, was born into this unimaginative business. When his father died, quite asunemotionally as he lived, the younger inherited with the office and the business the hours of going and coming of the elder, his air of practicality and unexcite- ment, his preciseness and exactness, his nose glasses and his calm, and almost his age. Farrell Howard, Jr., may be said to have been Brookline's oldest yeung man. He was the creature of his father's habit, following without a thought of anything else the routine of the inherited office and home. Farrell was short, sandy of hair, near-sighted and formidable only when thrown off the path of habit. Then he was irritable and complaining until he managed to get his feet back into the fixed ways of established office and household custom. Each Saturday afterno...