It was in thinking this over that Jim conceived an idea that became a great comfort to him. He decided to write down all the advice that he could recall his father's giving him, and when his mother became less broken up, to ask her to tell him all the plans his father might have had for him.
So it was that a week or so after her husband's death, Mrs. Manning found one of Jim's scratch pads on the table in his room, with a carefully printed title on the cover:
After she had wiped the quick tears from her eyes, she read the few pages Jim had completed in his sprawling hand:
"My father said to me, 'Jimmy, never make excuses. It's always too late for excuses.'
"He said, 'A liar is a first cousin to a skunk. There isn't a worse coward than a liar.'
"He said to me, 'Don't belly-ache. Stand up to your troubles like a man.'
"My father said, 'Hang to what you undertake like a hound to a warm scent.'
"He said to me, 'Life is made up of obeying. What you don't learn from me about that, the world will kick into you. The stars themselves obey a law. God must hate a law breaker.'
"My father said, 'Somehow us Americans are quitters.'
"My mother said my father said, 'I want Jimmy to go through college. I want him to marry young and have a big family.'
"The thing my father said to me oftenest lately was, 'Jimmy, be clean about women. Some day you will know what I mean when I say that sex is energy. Keep yourself clean for your life work and your wife and children.'"
Mrs. Manning read the pages over several times, then she laid the book down and stood staring out of the window.
"Oh, he was a good man!" she whispered. "He was a good man! If Jimmy could have had him just two years more! I don't know how to teach him the things a man ought to know. A boy needs his father.----Oh, my love! My love----"
Down below, Jim was leaning on the front gate. His chum, Phil Chadwick, was coming slowly up the street. The boys had not been near Jim since the funeral. Jim had become a person set apart from their boy world. No one appreciates the dignity of grief better than a boy, or underneath his awkwardness has a finer way of showing it. Phil's mother, to his unspeakable discomfort, had insisted now that he go call on Jim.