In one particular, at least, the friends of Hildegarde Moncrief were mistaken. The wholesale hardware business prospered amazingly. In the fifteen years between Benjamin Button’s marriage in 1880 and his father’s retirement in 1895, the family fortune was doubled—and this was due largely to the younger member of the firm., His History of the Civil War in twenty volumes, which had been refused by nine prominent publishers., Meeting him on the street, his contemporaries would stare enviously at the picture he made of health and vitality., It was in 1890 that he executed his famous business coup, And if old Roger Button, now sixty-five years old, had failed at first to give a proper welcome to his son he atoned at last by bestowing on him what amounted to adulation., Grow younger, There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button, A woman of thirty-five, 1920, She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end., The Spanish-American War in 1898, He was slightly wounded, and received a medal., She was a woman of forty now, with a faint skirmish line of gray hairs in her head. The sight depressed him., His reflection in the familiar mirror, The process was continuing, “But there’s a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you’ve made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don’t suppose I can stop you, but I really don’t think it’s very considerate.”, You think you don’t want to be like any one else. You always have been that way, and you always will be. But just think how it would be if every one else looked at things as you do—what would the world be like?”, His wife, a dowager of evil omen, sat among the chaperons, now in haughty disapproval, and now following him with solemn, puzzled, and reproachful eyes., They had forgotten—as people inevitably forget—that back in 1880 their mammas and papas had also remarked about this same ill-matched pair., He and his son were, in fact, often mistaken for each other. This pleased Benjamin, Hildegarde was almost fifty, and the sight of her made him feel absurd…., He was admitted, and almost immediately attained a prominent position in the class, partly because he seemed a little older than the other freshmen, whose average age was about eighteen., Harvard University in Cambridge, Football game, He made no touchdowns—indeed, he was retained on the team chiefly in hope that his enormous reputation would bring terror and disorganisation to the Yale team., He determined after his graduation to enter himself at St. Midas’s, where the sheltered life among boys his own size would be more congenial to him., Roscoe was married now and prominent in Baltimore life, and he wanted no scandal to creep out in connection with his family., But though he was welcomed in a general way there was obviously no heartiness in Roscoe’s feeling toward him, When visitors are in the house I want you to call me ‘Uncle’, it had seemed for a moment that the farce of his early years was to be repeated. But whiskers had itched and made him ashamed, The Boy Scouts in Bimini Bay, Alas, sixteen was the minimum age, and he did not look that old. His true age, which was fifty-seven, would have disqualified him, anyway., Brigadier-general in the United States army with orders to report immediately., “I’ll soon darn well show you whose little boy I am!” retorted, Benjamin in a ferocious voice. “Get down off that horse!”, Two days later, however, his son Roscoe materialised from Baltimore, hot and cross from a hasty trip, and escorted the weeping general, sans uniform, back to his home., “The thing” to mention, that the little grubby boy, apparently about ten years of age who played around the house with lead soldiers and a miniature circus, was the new baby’s own grandfather., ” It seemed to him that his father, in refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a “red-blooded he-man”—this was Roscoe’s favourite expression—but in a curious and perverse manner, Roscoe took them both to kindergarten on the same day, And when the long day was done at five o’clock he would go upstairs with Nana and be fed on oatmeal and nice soft mushy foods with a spoon., There were no troublesome memories, there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him. , All these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember., Only his crib and Nana’s familiar presence, Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind..

Benjamin Buton chapters 7 to the end

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