Next day Judy Simmons did not appear. I wanted to ask Mort what might have happened to her but sensed that I should not. Although Mort seemed quite unconcerned, the mere fact that he did not talk about it was suspicious. It was a week before she turned up again. She knocked on the door of the shed and, when I opened the door, she glared at me  coldly.
 “Beat it, pimple face.”
And she roughly pushed past me, stalked in, and glared fiercely at Mort Decker.
 “You bastard.”
I knew there had to be some metal in the yard that I had not chalked yet, and hurried off to find it.
    I was still looking for it when she left. Mort came and found me, and stood, regarding the chalk marks on the ends of all the rods in the stack and shaking his head:
 “There wasn’t any order,” he said grimly.
 “Is something wrong?” I ventured.
 “Ah, you know what women are like,” Mort snorted.
Since I did not know what women were like, but did not want to admit it, that was the end of the conversation.
    Mort changed. The sparkle went from his eyes, the fixed smile from his lips, the spring from his stride. He looked older, greyer, the shine gone from his flesh, and even his hair seemed a little ruffled. When the drivers came they did not speak to him as cheerily as before.

It still lacked half an hour of sunrise, when Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon—we will not say awoke; it being doubtful whether the lady had so much as closed her eyes during the brief night of midsummer—but in all events, arose from her solitary pillow, and began what it would be a mockery to term the adornment of her person. Far from us be the undecorum of assisting, even in imagination, at a maiden lady’s toilet! Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah at the threshold of her chamber; only presuming, meanwhile, to note some heavy sighs that laboured her bosom, with little restraint as it their lugubrious depth and volume of a sound, inasmuch as they could be audible to nobody, save a disembodied listener like ourself.
    Honestly, I thought all this meant the old bag got up and went, as we all do, to the dunny while we stood listening to those ensuing noises that it is always best not to comment on in polite company. For a long time, I thought the word lugubrious was a polite way of saying ‘farting’.
    A shameful trivialisation of a fine book. Sorry to all those true believers. But after that experience, maybe I just wasn’t able to get into the right spirit of the occasion. I read on expecting more frank realisms of this type and was, of course, disappointed. Imagine my surprise when I reread the book, three decades later, and discovered that the first realism wasn’t there either.
   The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a weird tale really. Mildly interesting, somewhat intriguing and very well written, but I must say that given its reputation, I expected more. It’s a squabble over some property, immersed in the witch trials that used to happen in them parts, and a murder thirty years ago. The witchcraft returns, the murder is repeated, but it all works out all right.
    I don’t know what the judge, nor his victim, died of. I didn’t believe in the strange power that the Maule’s have over the Pincheons. But if you go to Salem, the house is there and real and you can count the gables for yourself. I just didn’t believe this book—I was not convinced. And if you’re going to put the supernatural in a story, you’ve got be convincing. Here it just seems added to give the tale a haunting air—it doesn’t actually play any part in the story. Sorry, the greatness was lost on me. Maybe I should lower my expectations of what is and isn’t great.