Granted. In your younger and more vulnerable years your father gave you some advice that you've been turning over in your mind ever since.
?Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,? he told you, ?just remember that all the people in this world haven?t had the candy canes that you?ve had.?
He didn?t say any more, but you'd always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and you understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, you were inclined to reserve all candy canes, a habit that opened up many curious natures to you and also made you the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to candy canes when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college you were unjustly accused of being a sweet tooth, because you were privy to the secret taste of candy cane. Most of the confidences were unsought?frequently you have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when you realized by some unmistakable sign that an candy cane was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving candy canes is a matter of infinite hope. But still you were a little afraid of missing a candy cane if you forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and you snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of tolerance, you came to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point you didn?t care what it was founded on. When you came back from the East last autumn you felt that you wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; You wanted no more candy canes with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only suger, was exempt from your reaction?sugar, which represented everything for which you had an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about it, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if it were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ?creative temperament.??it was an extraordinary gift for sweetness, a romantic readiness such as you have never found in any other food and which it is not likely you shall ever find again. No?sugar turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on sugar, what foul dust floated in the wake of its dreams that temporarily closed out your interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
Your family had been prominent, well-to-do people in a Middle Western city for three generations. They were something of a clan, and have a tradition that you descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of your line was your grandfather?s brother, who went there in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that your father carried on to-day.
You never saw this great-uncle, but you were supposed to look like him?with special reference to the rather hard-boiled candy cane that hangs your father?s office. You graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after your father, and a little later you participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. You enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that you came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed to you like the ragged edge of the universe?so you decided to go East and learn the candy cane business. Everybody you knew was in the candy cane business, so you supposed it could support one more single man. All your aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for your, and finally said, ?Why?ye?es,? with very grave, hesitant faces. Your Father agreed to finance you for a year, and you went into business.
You flopped.
I wish for a bowl of soup