But he remembered.

We are curious creatures, we men, and we remember much more than we pretend to.

For our mothers in many cases were women, and we take after them.
As Barclay stood in the door of his car debating whether or not to go in, the light from the chimney of the sawmill on the hill attracted his attention, and because he was in a mood for it, the flying sparks trailing across the night sky reminded him of the fireworks that Fourth of July in 1873, when he and Jane Mason and Bob and Molly spent the day together, picnicking down in the timber and coming home to dance on the platform under the cottonwood-bough pavilion in the evening.

It was a riotous day, and Bob and Molly being lovers of long acceptance assumed a paternal attitude to John and Jane that was charming in the main, but sometimes embarrassing.

And of all the chatter he only remembered that Jane said: "Think how many years these old woods have been here--how many hundred years--maybe when the mound-builders were here! Don't you suppose that they are used to--to young people--oh, maybe Indian lovers, and all that, and don't you suppose the trees see these young people loving and marrying, and growing old and ugly and unhappy, and that they some way feel that they are just a little tired of it all ?" If any one replied to her, he had no recollection of it, for after that he saw the dance and heard the music, and then events seemed to slip along without registering in his memory.