One cares
little even to eat such snow, and the eating of icicles, also,
has come to be a flaccid and stale diversion. There is no ice to
bear a skate, there is only a vast sufficiency of cold mud,
practically useless. Sunshine flickers shiftily, coming and going
without any honest purpose; snow-squalls blow for five minutes,
the flakes disappearing as they touch the earth; half an hour
later rain sputters, turns to snow and then turns back to
rain--and the sun disingenuously beams out again, only to be shut
off like a rogue's lantern. And all the wretched while, if a boy
sets foot out of doors, he must be harassed about his overcoat
and rubbers; he is warned against tracking up the plastic lawn
and sharply advised to stay inside the house. Saturday might as
well be Sunday.
Thus the season. Penrod had sought all possible means to pass the
time. A full half-hour of vehement yodelling in the Williams'
yard had failed to bring forth comrade Sam; and at last a
coloured woman had opened a window to inform Penrod that her
intellect was being unseated by his vocalizations, which
surpassed in unpleasantness, she claimed, every sound in her
previous experience and, for the sake of definiteness, she stated
her age to be fifty-three years and four months.
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