Part + 

IV + 

XVIII + 

When Evangeline read the little note asking her to step into Mr. Willing’s office, she thought of course the new things from Hasenheimer’s had come, and that Mr. Willing would ask her if she could come back that evening to help unpack and place them. But it was Mrs. Willing’s voice which called “Come in!” to her knock, and the moment she opened the door she knew by the expression on Mr. Willing’s face that something important was on the way. + 

Mr. Willing waited till she and his wife had gone through the necessary greetings and then brought it out flatly, “Mrs. Knapp, Miss Flynn has just told us that, because of certain changes in her family affairs, she will be leaving us next month.” + 

He went on talking after this, but Evangeline did not need to hear him. She knew everything that he would say before he said it⁠—all except the salary! That was certainly more than Miss Flynn had ever had! And to begin with! There was only one idea in her head. How soon could she fly to a telephone to tell Lester the good news. She could never wait till she went home that evening. She loved Lester for her certainty that it would make him as happy as she was, that he would not feel jealous or hateful. How good Lester was! + 

She saw on the faces of the two people opposite her a reflection of what must be on her own. They understood what the moment was to her. + 

And to them too. She felt in their voices as they talked to her a new relationship towards her, a new respect. They needed her as she needed them. She was important to them and their splendid work. It was wonderful to be really useful in a big thing! + 

“Yes, indeed, Mrs. Willing!” she assented with all her heart, as the younger woman said, “We feel that you can understand our position. It is not just a store to us, you see. It is our Life Work.” + 

This seemed a little flamboyant and feminine to Mr. Willing, who said correctively, “We think it rather a remarkable opportunity, all things considered, for giving good store service. With the support the store would naturally get from the town and the farming region around us, we expect,” he coughed, “we hope to double the business before so very many years.” + 

“Oh, more than that!” cried his wife. “Of course this is confidential, Mrs. Knapp. We wouldn’t want it to go any further. But since we think of you as in on the ground floor with us.⁠ ⁠… If with Mr. Willing’s poor old uncle’s rusty machinery the store actually paid expenses, there’s simply no telling what can be done with a modern organization such as my husband has worked out in his mind. Better wages, lower prices, and what merchandise!” + 

“My idea of good merchandise, Mrs. Knapp,” said Mr. Willing seriously, “is that it shall be a liberal education in taste.” + 

Mrs. Willing put in spiritedly, “Give us ten years’ time and see if the Saturday evening crowds don’t look different in this town. The clothes they wear now must give them an inferiority-complex right down to the marrow of their bones!” + 

“Give us ten years’ time,” said Mr. Willing, laughing, “and see if there is a single golden-oak, Morris-chaired ‘best room’ left in town!” + 

Evangeline felt dazzled by all that was happening; her promotion; sitting here in such an intimate way with the proprietors of the business; having them talk in this wonderful way of their wonderful conception of what the business really was. It was her conception too. Every word found an echo in her heart, although she had not had the education to express it brilliantly as they did. But she was uneasy at being away from her post so long. What would Miss Flynn think? The exquisite surprise it was to realize that it no longer made any difference what Miss Flynn thought! She felt an inch taller. + 

Mr. Willing said now, “I’ve been wanting to have a talk with you about things in general, and now’s as good a time as any. We want you to understand the situation in a comprehensive way, in a large way. There are certain elements in the retail dry-goods business which give rise to considerable concern on the part of.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Off on polysyllables!” thought his wife. She cut in briskly, with the effect of scissors snipping in two a slowly unwinding tape, “It’s the mail-order houses and the ten-cent stores we’re afraid of. It’s frightful how they steal the business of country people away from where it belongs. The first thing that has to be done is to give them our dust. And it can be done by making the store known for such good personal service and such real attention to customers’ needs that they’ll enjoy coming to the store. And once they’re inside the doors.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“After all, how even the best of women see things in a little, narrow, concrete way!” thought Mr. Willing. “Nothing big and constructive in their minds.” Aloud he said with simplicity and dignity, “I was brought up on a farm myself, Mrs. Knapp, and a very poor farm. And I have a very special feeling about our country customers. I know how few occasions there are in farm life for civilized mingling with our fellow-men, how little brightness and color there is in country life. It is my ambition to make every trip to our store as educative as an afternoon tea-party for the womenfolk on a farm. And I want every purchase at our counters to help every fine big farm-boy to shuck off his awkward countrified ways that put him at such a disadvantage beside any measly, little, cocksure, tenement-house rat!” Experiences of his own past burned in his voice, “We’re counting on you, Mrs. Knapp, to train your girls to have just the right manner with country customers. You know, cordial, but respectful, friendly, but no soft-soap business.” + 

“I know just what you mean!” Evangeline burst out suddenly, with such an earnest conviction that they stopped talking for an instant to enjoy her oneness with them. Yes, she would do. She would do. + 

“My ideal,” said Jerome, “is service. What I want the store to be is a little piece of the modern world at its best, set down within reach of all this fine American population around us. I want to select for them the right things, the things they never could select for themselves for lack of training. With modern methods such as my wife and I are familiar with, a quicker turnover with better salespeople, we can raise⁠—not wages⁠—but commissions to keep efficiency up to the notch. And we can lower prices and sell goods that will put our people on a level with big-city people. For I have long felt, Mrs. Knapp, that the alarming American exodus to the cities comes from a nagging sensation of inferiority that would disappear with the possession of really satisfactory merchandise. You see,” he said, smiling at her, “that in our small way, we will all be contributing to the highest interests of the country.” + 

“Of course on a sound business basis,” put in his wife. + 

“Oh, of course on a sound business basis,” repeated the proprietor of the store. + 

The three shook hands on it with unanimity. + 

XIX + 

With her materials and patterns laid out on the dining-room table, Mattie Farnham was trying to cut out a dress for her Margaret, an undertaking which was going jerkily because of the arrival, seriatim, of the children from school. They came in at different times, as suited their different ages and their rank in the hierarchy of grades. Little Jim in the first grade was free at two, Loren in the fourth was turned loose at three, and Margaret and Ellen appeared soon after four. The hour of the arrival varied, but the manner was identical: a clatter of hurried feet on the porch, the bursting open of the door, and the questing yell of “Mother! Mo‑o‑other!” + 

Mattie always answered with an “Oo-hoo!” on two notes, adding, “in the di‑i‑ining-room!” but she never waited for them to come to find her. She always laid down her work and all thought of it and hastened to give the returned wanderer a hug and kiss and run an anxious eye over his aspect to see what had happened to him during his day out in the world. + 

“Jimmy, you look tired. Did you eat your lunch good? Come on with me and get a piece of bread and butter.” + 

“Say, Mother, Teacher picked me out to say the good morning greeting to the whole school this morning at Assembly.” + 

“Did she? Which one did you say? Weren’t you scared? Say it to me. Let’s hear.” + 

A half hour later they would still be in the pantry, Jimmy swinging his legs from his mother’s cushiony lap, telling her between mouthfuls about everything that had happened in the long interval since he had seen her last. Mattie listened eagerly, stroking the hair back from the square white forehead, gloating greedily over the changing expressions on the little open, rosy face. + 

Then Jimmy wanted to know what she was doing and trotted back with her to the dining-room and had to have the nature of patterns explained to him, and hung over her as she worked, rumpling up the paper and getting in her way, his tongue and hers flying together. + 

Somehow it was time for Loren. Wherever had that last hour gone to? The crash of the opening door, the shrill whoop of “Mother! Mo‑o‑other!” And it all began again, this time with an exciting account of how Teacher gave Morton Cummings the awfulest calling-down you ever heard for copying off of Sadie Bennett’s paper. Both Jimmy and Mother were spellbound. + 

But Margaret’s dress did not progress very rapidly. At a quarter of four Mattie still had the sleeves to cut out, and she’d have to put her mind on them because she hadn’t bought enough dimity and they would have to be pieced under the arm. “Loren, you and Jimmy run out and play a while, won’t you, that’s good boys. Mother’s got to get this done.” + 

“Mercy! Evangeline Knapp would have had that dress all cut out and basted up.⁠ ⁠…” + 

And then, right out of a clear sky, came the unheralded thunderbolt of a new idea⁠—how could it have come like that! She had not thought of the Knapps, not once all that day. She had been wrapped up in her work and in the children; yet the minute she had thought of Eva’s name⁠ ⁠… it was all there, as though she had been studying over them for weeks! Everything in her head had shucked together different, like when you look in a kaleidoscope and give it a shake, and there’s a new design. Why! Why! One thing after another came to her⁠ ⁠… how could it be she had never thought of it before? It was so plain now⁠ ⁠… why, yes! + 

The inquiring shout of Margaret and Ellen had no response. Surprised and aggrieved, they pushed on hastily in search of their mother and found her dropped into a chair by the dining-room table, her big scissors in her hand, her eyes wide and fixed. She answered them absently, she hardly looked at them, she never noticed that Ellen had lost her hair-ribbon, she interrupted Margaret’s account of how Maria Elwell’s petticoat had come off by jumping up and saying suddenly as though she didn’t even know that Margaret was talking, “See here, girls, I’ve got to run over to your Uncle Lester’s for something. You keep an eye on Jimmy, will you?” + 

What was the matter with Mother anyhow, Margaret and Ellen asked themselves over their four o’clock pieces of gingerbread. But they were not much worried. There was never very much the matter with Mother. + 

She hurried so that she was puffing as she went up the porch steps of the Knapp house⁠—and yet when she opened the door she did not know why she had come nor what to say. Henry and Helen were just in also, enjoying cookies and milk and telling their father about the events of the day. The sight of the cookies gave Mattie her cue. + 

“Do those spice-cookies agree with Henry?” she asked. + 

“Sure they do,” said Lester. “Everything does nowadays! Henry seems to have grown right out of that weak stomach of his. He eats like a wolf, I tell him. The doctor says they do sometimes outgrow those childish things as they get near their teens.” + 

“Oh, yes, as they get near their teens,” said Mattie. + 

A moment later she asked, “Helen, aren’t you fatter than you used to be? Seems as though you were lots fuller in the face.” + 

“Did you just get around to notice that, Aunt Mattie?” said Helen, laughing. “You ought to see me trying to get into a last summer’s dress. They don’t come together⁠—my!⁠—there’s that much of a gap.” She showed with her hands how wide a gap it was. + 

“Helen has put on eight pounds,” explained Lester. “The school nurse says all the children are gaining like everything, now they serve milk at recess-time.” + 

“Oh, yes, milk at recess-time,” said Aunt Mattie. + 

Helen and Henry finished their cookies and tore out to inspect their poultry. The children and Lester had gone into the chicken-business on a small scale and were raising some brooder chicks in a packing-case chicken-house in the back yard. Stephen was there already, hanging over the low wire-netting “watching their tail-feathers grow,” as he said. + 

Lester quoted this as he wheeled himself to the open door where Mattie stood looking out at the children fussing maternally over the little peeping yellow balls. “Honest to goodness, Mattie, their tail and wing feathers do come in so fast you can see them grow.” He added, “I’m watching feathers grow, too. Stephen is fairly sprouting wings he’s so good! It’s because he can play out of doors again, I suppose, after the winter. We’ve had such lovely weather of late.” + 

“Yes, it must be because he can play out of doors again,” said Aunt Mattie. + 

As they turned back into the kitchen, where a batch of bread was ready to be put into the oven, she asked, “Lester, aren’t you better of your indigestion lately?” + 

“Sh!” he warned her whimsically, his finger at his lips. “Don’t mention it aloud. I haven’t had any in months. But I don’t want it spoken about. Leave sleeping dogs lie. The doctor always said it was nervous, you know. I don’t know much about the geography of my innards, but I’ve thought once or twice that maybe that awful shakeup my nervous system got might have sorted things over into the right pile, as far as digestion goes. It’s not, however,” he said with a sudden grim, black look at his paralyzed legs, “a cure for indigestion that I could recommend.” + 

The tears sprang into Mattie’s eyes as she turned her face away, “It’s pretty hard!” + 

“I don’t pretend it’s any picnic. But it’s of no consequence of course.” He was able to say this with a bare and utter sincerity. + 

“Look here, Lester!” she broke out. “Why couldn’t you⁠—I don’t believe but what you could go and be a professor somewhere in a University or a High School. Professors don’t have to walk around. And you’ve always set such store by poetry and books and everything. There can’t be anybody who’s more.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Lester broke in with a laugh at her absurdity. “Why, you dear old girl, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’d make a mess of what they want in a school just as much as at the store. What makes you think colleges want teachers who love literature? They want somebody who can make young people sit still and listen whether they feel like it or not. They want somebody who can ‘keep order’ in a class room and drill students on dates so they can pass examinations. I couldn’t do that! And I’d loathe forcing literature down the throats of boys and girls who didn’t want it as I’d loathe selling things to people who didn’t need them. I’d be just a dead loss at it the way I always am.” + 

Seeing that she did not follow this, he added concretely, “Besides I could no more get a job without all the right certificates than I could set up shop as a doctor. Nowadays colleges want you to be a Ph. D. And there isn’t a crossroads High School that’d look at a man who had only had three years in a State University fifteen years ago and had been making a failure of keeping accounts in a department store ever since.” + 

Mattie recognized the irrefutable nature of all this. “Yes, I see,” she said sadly. + 

“Isn’t Mattie the ignorant, impractical old infant!” thought Lester. + 

She got up now, with a long breath, and silently took herself off. + 

Although it was long past time to start supper, she did not go home. She went straight down to Willing’s and into the Cloak-and-Suits. Eva was busy with customers as usual. “Everybody wants Eva to wait on them,” thought Mattie, sitting down heavily. Her eyes were fixed on Evangeline. What a splendid woman she was, and, now she had some money to spend on her clothes, what a stylish-looking woman! There wasn’t anybody in town could hold a candle to her. Mattie made these reflections automatically. These were always the first thoughts which came to her when she saw Eva. + 

But today, ravaged as she was by this new perception, in which she was so all alone, her mind dwelt little on style. What she saw today was Eva’s face, alert, interested, sympathetic, and Eva’s eyes, which had always had, so Mattie remembered, “a sort of wild look,” now so shining and quiet, looking from the suits she was showing to her customers. They were a couple of women from out in the country, elderly mother and grown-up daughter. Mattie was too far off to hear what was said, but she understood perfectly from the pantomime and from the expression of the three faces, what the situation was. The two women had thrown themselves on Eva’s taste to help them make up their minds, and Eva, looking at them intently, was putting herself wholeheartedly in their places so that she could give them her best judgment. How happy she looked! + 

As she watched, a lump came into Mattie’s throat, and she felt her eyes hot and misty. What in time was the matter with her? She swallowed hard and looked away and tried to think of something else. But she could not. Lester and Stephen and Henry and Helen⁠ ⁠… and Eva!⁠ ⁠… came and stood before her eyes⁠—her opened eyes. + 

“My goodness! I mustn’t get to crying here in the store!” she thought, alarmed, starting up and going to the window. + 

When she turned around, Eva’s customers had made their decision, a momentous one, judging from the relief on their faces. The three women were chatting and smiling together, relaxed and cheerful. Mattie heard Eva say, “I know you’ll take the greatest comfort in it!” She went with her customers to the head of the stairs, talking like an old friend. They shook hands with her, respectfully, cordially. Then she turned around and came almost running back towards Mattie. “Mattie, I’ve got something to tell you,” she said hurriedly, smiling. She looked around her to make sure no one was near and lowered her voice, “Miss Flynn’s niece has died and leaves four little children and their father wants Miss Flynn⁠—he hasn’t got any relative of his own⁠—to go and bring the children up and keep house for him. He’s in the greenhouse business at Cleveland. Plenty of money. And she is going.” + 

Mattie did not understand this. She understood few things at once. She saw nothing but Eva’s curving, smiling lips and bright shining eyes. She understood them with no difficulty. + 

“Don’t you see?” whispered Eva. “Somebody’s going to be moved up to her place, head of the department. They’re going to give me a try at it. Aren’t they good! Mattie! It’s three thousand a year! And a bonus for extra sales! And such fascinating work! I’m wild to get my hands on it and see what I can do with the salesgirls. Oh, Mattie, we can begin to lay by a little something every month for the children’s college. Perhaps we can buy a Ford that Lester can get out in with the children. Oh, Mattie!” + 

At this Mattie disgraced herself and showed once more, as she said apologetically, what an idiot she was by bursting into senseless, hysteric tears and having to be carried off in haste to the toilet-room to cold water and smelling salts. + 

“I’ve felt all squimbly this whole afternoon,” she explained, blowing her nose. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Old fool, I guess.” + 

“Well, it almost makes me feel like crying myself,” said Eva, holding out a glass of water to her. “It’s come so soon, so much sooner than I dared to hope. And it will mean so much to Lester and the children. They’d never have had a college education any other way. Why, Mattie, I’ve kept thinking all day about the hymn, ‘God moves in a mysterious way, His.⁠ ⁠…’ ” + 

“Don’t!” said Mattie huskily. “You’ll get me started again.” + 

“Of course,” Eva said now, “it’s dreadfully hard for a mother to be separated from her.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Mattie broke in hastily, as if to change the subject, “Eva, how is that eczema of yours lately?” + 

Mrs. Knapp rolled up a fashionably wide sleeve and showed a clean, white upper arm. “Dr. Merritt finally found a cure,” she said, “a new kind of ointment he heard about in a medical convention. It’s worked like a charm. I haven’t had a touch of eczema⁠—why, in I don’t know when! It took the doctor long enough to get around to it, but he finally did.” + 

It was half-past five when Mrs. Farnham left the store, but still she did not start home. “Let them wait for supper!” she thought, desperately. What was supper compared to some other things! She hurried heavily along towards Dr. Merritt’s house, hoping to goodness he would be in. + 

He was, sitting on the porch, reading the evening paper. “Hello, Mrs. Farnham,” he said, surprised to see her. “I didn’t think I’d ever get any business out of your family. Who’s broken a leg?” + 

“We’re all right,” she told him. “I wanted to ask you about the Knapps. You know I’m sort of related to Mr. Knapp. I’ve been wondering what you really thought about him⁠ ⁠… whether he’ll ever be cured, I mean.” + 

The doctor noticed that her voice trembled as she spoke. What a good-natured creature she was, taking other people’s troubles so to heart. + 

He hesitated. It was not at all his habit to talk about his patients to outsiders, least of all to any such chatterbox as Mrs. Farnham. But he had thought several times lately that, if Lester Knapp were to make any progress, he would need to start a campaign to dry up the gushing spring of family sympathy. He knew all about that sort of campaign from much experience, but he was never resigned to the necessity for it. “Darn families and their sympathy!” he often said impatiently. “They ‘poor-Charlie’ and ‘poor-Mary’ more sick people into their graves than we doctors do.” + 

He had long suspected that well-meaning Mrs. Farnham did a good deal of “poor-Lestering” at the Knapps. Maybe this was a chance to head her off, to get her mind started along a new track. Of course he must remember to use the simplest, most elementary language with her. She was really almost an illiterate. + 

“I’ll tell you, Mrs. Farnham, just what I think about the case. As near as I can make out, the effusion of blood within the spinal canal has been safely absorbed, or nearly so. There seems to be no displacement or injury to the spinal bones; there is no wasting away of the muscles as would be the case if the spinal cord were injured. There is, I believe, good reason to hope that the loss of power in his legs is a sequel of organic conditions which have now passed away. The case now needs a psychic treatment rather than a mechanical.” + 

“Organic?” said Mrs. Farnham, faintly. The word made her think of church. + 

“I mean that in my opinion no physical lesion now exists in spite of the abnormal sensations which Mr. Knapp still feels. We must try toning up the general health, overcoming the shock to the nervous system. As soon as the weather permits, I shall try heliotherapy.” + 

Mrs. Farnham caught her breath. + 

“That is, treatment of the affected areas by direct exposure to sunlight. They have done wonderful things in France with that treatment in just this sort of trouble. And of course at any time any sort of sudden nervous stimulus might do the business. You see, Mrs. Farnham, Mr. Knapp’s case is now like that of the people who are cured at Lourdes, or by Coué. The very same sort of phenomenon.” + 

“I don’t understand very well,” said Mattie humbly. “What I wanted to know was⁠ ⁠…” her voice faltered, “do you think you can cure him?” + 

“Isn’t she the dumbbell!” thought the doctor. + 

He went on aloud, hoping she would repeat his words to Mrs. Knapp, “Don’t you say anything about it, Mrs. Farnham, especially to Mrs. Knapp. I don’t want to crow till we are out of the woods. I wouldn’t say anything to you if you were not a relative and a sensible woman. I don’t want them to have a breath of it, for fear of disappointment.⁠ ⁠…” (How strangely she was looking at him, her face so white and anxious!) He brought it out roundly, “Yes, Mrs. Farnham, just between us, I really believe I can cure him.” + 

She gave a low cry that was like a wail. “Oh, Doctor!” she cried, appalled, staring at him. + 

What was the matter with the woman, now? He stared back at her, blankly, startled, entirely at a loss. + 

Another look came into her eyes, an imploring, imploring look. She clasped her hands beseechingly. “Oh, Doctor!” she begged him, in a quavering voice. + 

From her eyes, from her voice, from her beseeching attitude, from her trembling hands, he took in her meaning⁠—took it in with a tingling shock of surprise at first. And then with a deep recognition of it as something he had known all along. + 

She saw the expression change in his face, saw the blank look go out of his eyes, saw the understanding look come in. + 

It was a long rich interchange of meanings that took place as they sat staring hard at each other, the gaunt, middle-aged man no longer merely a doctor, the dull middle-aged woman, transfigured to essential wisdom by the divination of her loving heart. Profound and human things passed from one to the other. + 

Mattie heard someone stirring in the house. “I must go! I must go!” she said groaningly. She limped down the path. Her feet were aching like the toothache with the haste of her expeditions that afternoon. + 

Half an hour later they had to come out and call the doctor to supper, fairly to shout in his ear he was so sunk in his thoughts, the evening paper lying unread across his knees. + 

“Mercy me! Didn’t you hear the supper bell?” cried his wife. “It’s been ringing like anything!” + 

XX + 

On the evening of the day when Mrs. Knapp was informed that she would be put in Miss Flynn’s place Helen and her father celebrated by making an omelette with asparagus tips (Mother’s favorite supper dish) and Henry was sent scurrying out to bring back a brick of mixed vanilla and chocolate from Angelotti’s Ice-Cream Parlor. They did not play whist that evening. They just sat around and talked it over and admired Mother and heard again and again about the thrice-blessed events in the family of Miss Flynn’s niece, which led to her retirement. “Of course it’s terribly, terribly sad!” Mother reminded them. “Those poor little children left without their mother! Nothing⁠—nothing can ever make up to them for such a loss.” + 

But this decent observation cast no shade over the rejoicings. Miss Flynn was but a remote and disagreeable legend to the children; and she had been a particular bête-noire for Lester in the old days. As for her utterly unknown niece⁠—no, Mother could not make that shadowy death cast anything but sunshine into their lives. They went on planning all the more energetically about the things they could do if they could have a Ford and go off to the country together for picnics on Sundays⁠—even Father! They talked about which college Helen would like to attend. They talked about which kind of bicycle Henry liked the best. + 

The children joined in the talk till nine o’clock, and long after they were in bed with their lights out they could hear the distant murmur of Father’s and Mother’s voices going on planning, such a friendly, cheerful, easy sort of murmur. Helen could not remember when she had ever heard Father and Mother talk together like that. It was like music in her ears. The last thought she had before she fell asleep was, “I am so happy! I never was so happy!” + 

Her mother fell asleep on the same thought. Apparently the excitement of it was too much for her, for she woke up suddenly, to hear the clock strike three, and found she could not get to sleep again because at once, in a joyful confusion, her mind was filled with a rush of happy thoughts, “I am to have Miss Flynn’s place. Three thousand a year. And a bonus! In a year or so I ought to be making four thousand.” + 

Four thousand dollars! They had never had more than eighteen hundred. Her thoughts vibrated happily between plans of what they could do here at the house and plans of what she would do in the reorganization of the department at the store. For some time, as she lay awake, her mind was as active and concrete and concentrated on her work as ever in the store; she was planning a system of postcard notices to customers when something especially suited to one or another came in:⁠—“Dear Mrs. Russell: Among the new things in the department which have just come in from New York are some smocked, handmade children’s dresses that look exactly like your little Margery.⁠ ⁠…” “Dear Miss Pelman: Do you remember the suit you did not buy because of the horizontal trimming on the skirt? Mr. Willing found in New York last week the same suit without that line. I am laying it aside till you can drop in to look at it.” + 

She wondered if she could let her salesgirls send out such cards too. No, it must be done with great discretion⁠—above all must not seem too urgent. People didn’t like to feel they were being hunted down. + 

She stepped about mentally among the innumerable details of her plans with her usual orderly mastery of them, her usual animated interest in them, her usual unquestioning acceptance of them as important. From them she went on to plans for a series of educational talks to her salesgirls about the fabrics and styles and fine points of their merchandise. She wished she could do the same thing for the girls in the Ladies’ Waist and Sweater Department. There were some such bright girls there, but so ignorant of their business. They’d pick it up in no time if they had the chance, if she were allowed to.⁠ ⁠… + 

Why! With a tremor all over her, she wondered if some time she might not be not only head of her own department, but superintendent for all that floor. By a flash of prescience she suddenly knew as she lay there alone in the quiet that the road to advancement lay open before her, that she could step along surely and steadily to success and take her dearly loved children with her, working for them with all her might, profoundly thankful to be able to give them what she had always so tragically and impotently wished them to have. + 

The wideness of this thought, the blackness of the night, the unwonted prone passivity of her energetic body, all wrought upon her to a strange softness of mood. She felt almost like a girl again⁠ ⁠… dreaming. + 

And that made her think of Lester. He had been in her mind more than usual of late, as she had learned more about the lives of the other women employed in the store. She was one of the older employees and almost at once the younger women had leaned on her, turned to her with confidences, and asked her advice as the women of her church had always done. But these were rougher, rawer lives into which she now looked. That haggard-eyed Mrs. Hemp, in the kitchenware department, what a horrible picture she had drawn of her relations with her husband. “He’s going with one of the girls in the collar-factory now, Mrs. Knapp. I wouldn’t put up with it a minute if it weren’t for the children. That man was unfaithful to me, Mrs. Knapp, six months after we were married, and my first baby on the way. And it’s been a new girl for him ever since whenever he got tired of the old one.” And Margaret Donahue, she that read novels on the sly, but never would look at a man, what had she said? “They make me sick,” she declared briefly with an expression on her young face which Mrs. Knapp would have given a good deal not to have seen. “I’d no more let a man come near me than a toad. I’ve seen too much of what Papa does to Mama.” + 

And the woman who scrubbed the floors, that evening she had come to beg Mrs. Knapp to let her sleep at the store, under a counter, in the toilet-room, anywhere, so she would not have to go home. “You’re a married woman yourself, Mrs. Knapp,” she had said. “You know what men are like. Judd is in one of his crazy spells! I’m afraid to go home till he gets over it. Honest I am, Mrs. Knapp. Let me stay here! I don’t care where! I’ll sit up all night in a chair if you’ll only let me stay.” + 

Eva had brought her home and let her sleep on a mattress on the floor in her own room. She had felt an immense horrified pity for her; but she had hated her for that phrase, “You are a married woman, Mrs. Knapp. You know what men are like!” Did she think for a minute that Lester Knapp was that kind of a brute! Couldn’t she see by looking at him that he was a million times too fine to⁠ ⁠… she hated the woman again tonight as she thought of it, and the thought brought up before her all that Lester had been to her. + 

No woman could have better reason than she to trust the delicacy, the warm loving-heartedness, the self-control, the innate decency of a man. They had been married for fourteen years, and from the sweet, sweet early days of their young honeymoon when, ignorant and innocent both of them, they had stumbled their way towards each other, she had never known a single instant of this poisonous atmosphere of suspicion and hate and endured violence which these other women apparently took for granted as the inevitable relationship of husband and wife. How good Lester had been to her! She had not appreciated it. She had not really thought of it. It had never occurred to her that he might be anything else. + 

And how good to the children! Never an impatient word, like most men. He was the best father in the world. Not another man she knew could have endured it to be so shut up with the children. How faithfully he had tried to take her place, now that she could not be in her rightful position with them. What lovely memories the children would have of their father, always! Was it possible he was of the same flesh and blood as Ellen O’Hern’s father who never, so Ellen said, passed one of his children without aiming a blow at it. + 

The overflowing of this affection for Lester which had been slowly rising for weeks; her deep thankfulness for what she would be able to do for the children⁠ ⁠… she found herself trembling in her bed. She felt an impulsive longing to share her emotion with Lester, to put her arms about his neck and let him know that she did not take his loyalty, his gentleness, his faithfulness, his fineness, so coldly for granted as she had seemed. She had been so unhappy about their hideous poverty. That was all. It was abominable to be poor! It brought out the worst in everyone. When you were distracted with worry about money, you simply weren’t yourself. + 

Warm and flushed, she sprang out of bed, lighted a candle and went softly downstairs in her slippered feet. Neither Lester nor Stephen woke as she went into the room, and she stood for an instant gazing down at them. Stephen was beautiful and strong, sleeping with both rounded arms flung up over his head. Lester was looking almost like a boy in the abandon of his sleep, like the fine, truehearted, sensitive boy to whom she had given herself as a girl. + 

But that boy had been vibrant with life from his head to his heels. And now half of his body lay dead. From the first it had been appalling to Evangeline to see that helpless, frozen immobility. How splendidly he had endured it, without a complaint! But she had seen from his eagerness tonight, as they talked of the possibility of having a Ford, how imprisoned he had felt, how wild with pleasure it made him to think he would be able to get out of these four walls. She would never have been as patient as he! If she had been condemned to that death-in-life of half her body, not able even to turn over in bed without waking up to a nightmare of struggle, her legs like so much stone.⁠ ⁠… + 

Had she made a sound? Had the light of the candle disturbed him a little? + 

Without waking, Lester drew a long breath, turned over easily in bed, drew up his knees with a natural, flexible motion, threw his arm out over the covers, and dropped off to profound sleep once more. + 

Everybody at the store was sure, the next day, that Mrs. Knapp was coming down with some serious malady. She was not only extremely pale and shaken by shivers that ran all over her. It was worse. She had a look of deathlike sickness that frightened the girls in her department. They sent for Mr. Willing to come. + 

When he did, he gave one look at Mrs. Knapp’s pinched face and stooped shoulders and ordered her home at once. “You’re coming down with the flu, Mrs. Knapp. Everybody’s having it. Now it doesn’t amount to anything this year if you take it quick. But it’s foolishness to try to keep on your feet. You get right home, take some quinine and some aspirin, and give yourself a sweat. You’ll be all right. But don’t wait a minute.” + 

Without a word, Mrs. Knapp put on her wraps and went out of the store. She did not turn homeward. She dared not go home and face Lester and the children till she had wrestled with those awful questions and had either answered them or been killed by them. + 

Where could she go to be alone? She decided that she would walk straight ahead of her out into the country. No, that would not do. Everybody knew her. They would comment on it. They would ask her questions. She felt that she would burst into shrieks if anyone asked her a question just then. + 

As she hesitated, she saw over the roofs of the houses the spire of St. Peter’s pointing upward, and with a rush her heart turned towards the quiet and solitude of the church. Thank Heaven, it was always kept open. + 

She hurried down a side-street and, pushing open the heavy door, stumbled forward into the hushed, dusky, empty building. She felt her way to the nearest pew, knelt down and folded her hands as if to pray. She tried with all her might to pray. But could not. + 

The raging unrest and turmoil in her heart rose up in clashing waves and filled the church with its clamor. It was in vain that she tried to combat it with odds and ends of prayers which came into her mind with the contact of the pew, with the familiar atmosphere of church. + 

“Almighty and most merciful Father.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Lester was better! + 

“Oh, God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Lester would get well⁠ ⁠… would get well! + 

“God be merciful to us and bless us and show us the.⁠ ⁠…” + 

And then.⁠ ⁠… And then.⁠ ⁠… + 

“No! No! No!” she cried out aloud, passionately, and pressed her trembling hands over her mouth, frightened. + 

She was a wicked woman. God be merciful to me, a sinner. She had no heart. She did not want her husband to get well. She did not want to go home and live with her children. + 

But she must. She must! There was no other way. Like a person shut up suddenly in an airless prison, she ran frantically from one locked door to another, beating her hands on them, finding them sullenly strong, not even shaken on their cruel steel hinges as she flung herself against them. If Lester got well, of course he could not stay at home and keep house and take care of the children⁠ ⁠… no able-bodied man ever did that. What would people say? It was out of the question. People would laugh at Lester. They would laugh at her. They would not admire her any more. What would people say if she did not go back at once to the children? She who had always been so devoted to them, she whom people pitied now because she was forced to be separated from them. Everyone had heard her say how hard it was for a mother to be separated from her.⁠ ⁠… + 

For one instant, an instant she never forgot, Evangeline knew for the first, the only time in her life, a gust of cold, deadly contempt for herself. It nearly killed her, she who had tried so hard all her life to keep her self-respect, she who had been willing to pay any price so that in her own eyes she might be always in the right. Yes, it nearly killed her. + 

But it did not reconcile her to the inevitable nor bow her spirit in resignation. Never before had she been asked to pay any such price as this. + 

She couldn’t! She couldn’t! She stood stock-still in her prison cell and wrung her hands in revolt. She simply could not. After having known something else, she could not go back to the narrow, sordid round of struggle with intolerable ever-renewed drudgery, to the daily, hourly contact with the children’s forgetfulness, carelessness, foolishness⁠ ⁠… to Stephen’s horrible tempers⁠ ⁠… with no outlet⁠ ⁠… no future⁠ ⁠… poverty for them all, always. + 

Poverty! It came down suffocatingly over her head like a smothering blanket thrown and twisted hard by an assailant who had sprung upon her out of the dark. She had thought herself safe from that long, slow starvation. To go back to it, to the raging, helpless narrowness of an income tragically too small, to rise up and lie down with that leaden care, to drag it about all day like a ball and chain⁠ ⁠… she could never endure it now that she knew that it was not in the least inevitable, knew how easy it was to avoid it, knew that if Lester were only willing to care a little more, to try a little harder, to put his mind on it really and truly, to give his heart to it as she did.⁠ ⁠… + 

All her old burning impatience with Lester was there, boiling up in clouds from the cauldron of her heart. + 

Through those turbid clouds she had a glimpse of a woman, touched and moved, standing by a man’s bedside and blessing him silently for his faithfulness, his gentleness, his fineness⁠ ⁠… but those figures were far away, flat and unreal, like something in a made-up picture. They were but an added irritation. She hated the thought of them as a creature in flames would hate the recollection of a running brook. + 

Poverty⁠ ⁠… isolation, monotony, stagnation, killing depression over never-ending servile tasks⁠ ⁠… poverty! + 

There was no way out. She knew that now. But she could not endure it. She never could endure it again. She would hate Lester. She would kill herself and the children. + 

She had sunk lower and lower till now she was crouching in a heap, panting, her bent arms over her face as if beaten down by relentless blows which she could no longer even try to parry. + 

What could she do? Her native energy rose up blindly, staggering, like a courageous fighter who has been knocked out but does not know it. What could she do? With a terrible effort, she strove to rise to a higher level than this mere brute suffering. She tried⁠—yes, she really tried for a moment to think what was the right thing to do. She tried again to pray, to ask God to show her what was the right thing for a good woman to do⁠—but she could not pray. + 

“Grant, O Lord, I beseech thee⁠ ⁠… pour into our hearts such.⁠ ⁠…” No, she could not pray. She could not command her mind to any such coherence as prayer. Whirling snatches of the thoughts which had filled her mind incessantly since the night before were blown across her attention like birds driven before a tornado⁠—“The place for a mother is with her children⁠—” How many times she had heard that⁠—and said it. She was a bad woman to rebel so against it. And it would do her no good to rebel. What else could she do? Around and around the cell she tore, beating her hands on those locked doors. Someone had to stay and keep house and take care of the children and make the home. And if Lester were cured he couldn’t. No able-bodied man could do such work, of course. Nobody ever heard of such a thing. Men had to make the living. What would people say? They would laugh. They would make fun of the children. And of Lester. And of her. They would think of course she ought to want to do it. Everyone had heard her say how hard it was for a.⁠ ⁠… And they couldn’t go away to another city, somewhere else, where no one knew them. Her one chance was here, here! + 

But all at once with a final roar the tumult swept off and went beating its way into the distance, out of the church and her heart. There was a dead, blank silence about her, through which there came to her a clear, neat, compact thought, “But perhaps Lester will not get well. Perhaps he will not get well.” + 

A deep bodeful hush filled her heart. It was as though she had suddenly gone deaf to all the noises of the world, to everything but that one possibility. She was straighter now, no longer crouched and panting. She was on her knees, her hands clasped, her head decently bent, in the familiar attitude of Sunday morning. + 

At last she was praying. + 

A moment later she was running out of the church as though a phantom had risen beside her and laid a skeleton hand on her shoulder⁠ ⁠… she had not been praying that Lester⁠ ⁠… no, it was not possible that she had been praying that her husband would not get well! + 

But soon she walked more quietly, more at her usual pace. After all she had nothing to go on, nothing to be sure of, nothing really to make her think it very likely that Lester would.⁠ ⁠… + 

XXI + 

One of the interests of life for Lester was the uncertainty about who was to be his mental companion for any given day. It seemed to be something over which he had no control. Sometimes he had thought it might be the weather which settled the matter. Not infrequently his first early-morning look at the world told him with which great spirit he was to live that day. A clear, breezy, bird-twittering dawn after rain meant Christina Rossetti’s child-poems. A soft gray downpour of warm rain, varnishing the grass to brilliance and beating down on the earth with a roll of muted drum-notes, always brought Hardy to his mind. Golden sun spilled in floods over the new green of the quivering young leaves meant Shelley. And Browning was for days when the sun rose rich and many-colored out of confused masses of turbid clouds. + 

But it was not always the weather. Sometimes as he opened his eyes, his chosen comrade for the day was there beside him before he had taken in anything more of the visible world than the white vacancy of the ceiling with those familiar blemishes, which were by this time a part of his brain. He did not always welcome the companion of the day, especially when the unseen spirit but repeated and intensified the color of his own temperament, from which he was so glad to escape by following the trumpets and fanfare of a temperament more brightly, more vividly alive. But he had found it was of little use to try to alter the day’s destiny. He could indeed, easily enough, bring to mind mechanically many others of the blessed company of articulate human beings who sang for him what he could never say for himself; but he could hear, really hear in his deep heart’s core, nothing but the appointed voice. + 

So he resigned himself to a brooding, astringent day when he woke up one morning and even before he opened his eyes, heard, + 

“But ‘falling, falling, falling’ there’s your song, + 

The cradle song that sings you to the grave.” + 

That was no longer meant for him, Lester reflected, as he struggled with the fatiguing, humiliating problem of getting himself dressed without help. He had spent years in falling, falling, falling⁠—and, tiring of it, had fallen once for all⁠—fallen all anybody could fall, so completely that there was no more to say about it. That job was done. + 

With a straining pull on his arms, he managed to swing and claw himself into his wheel chair, and sat quiet for a moment to get his breath. Whoever would think that dead human legs could be so infernally hard to get from one place to another! They seemed to weigh more than all the rest of his body put together, he thought, as he lifted one with both hands and changed it to an easier position. + 

He sat panting, losing for an instant his firmly held self-control, succumbing to what was always near the surface, a shamed horror of his mutilated, strengthless body. It came upon him that day with such poisonous violence that he was alarmed and aroused himself to resist. + 

“The thing to remember,” he told himself sternly and contemptuously, “is that it concerns only me, and what concerns me is not of the slightest importance. I’m done for, was really done for, long ago. Nothing that can happen to me matters now.” He heard as if it were a wistful voice saying, + 

“But neither parted roads, nor cent percent + 

May starve quite out the child that lives in us, + 

The Child that is the Man, the Mystery.” + 

And he replied bitterly to this, “That’s all you know about it! Cent percent can starve it dead, dead! It turned the trick for me, all right.” + 

“Well, no funeral orations over it anyhow,” he told himself. “If it got starved, that’s a sign it deserved to starve, that it didn’t have the necessary pep to hustle around and get its food. + 

“All that can be annihilated must be annihilated + 

That the children of Jerusalem may be saved from slavery.” + 

But he knew that he did not really believe this clean, trenchant ruthlessness, and cursed himself out for the sniveling sentimentality which he could not kill. + 

Then Stephen turned over and opened his eyes. Why, there was Father up and dressed already! He scrambled hastily to his knees, “You didn’t lace your shoes, did you?” he cried roughly and threateningly. That was a service to Father which he had taken for his very own. He would have killed Henry or Helen if they had dared to do it. + 

“No, old man, I didn’t lace my shoes,” said Father, smiling at him, “for the very good reason that I can’t. I couldn’t get along without the services of my valet.” + 

Stephen looked relieved, slid out of bed, sat down on the floor and began to pull the laces up. Once he looked up at his father and smiled. He loved to do this for Father. + 

That evening was the second time in succession that Evangeline went to bed directly after supper. She said she was trying to stave off an attack of influenza with extra sleep and doses of quinine. Lester and the children did not play whist when Mother was not there, neither when she was tired and went to bed early nor when she stayed down in the store evenings, taking stock or working over newly arrived goods with Mr. and Mrs. Willing. Whist was connected with Mother, and although she often told them they need not lose the evenings when she could not be there, and would enjoy playing with dummy for a change, they never got out the cards unless she was with them. + 

Father usually read aloud to them on such evenings, and they wouldn’t have missed that for anything. That evening he read a rhymed funny story about a farmer who got blown away from his barn one winter night, and, with his lantern waving, slid two miles down the mountain before he could stop himself. This was a great favorite of theirs and made them laugh harder every time they heard it. + 

“Sometimes he came with arms outspread + 

Like wings, revolving in the scene + 

Upon his longer axis and + 

With no small dignity of mien. + 

Faster or slower as he chanced, + 

Sitting or standing as he chose, + 

According as he feared to risk + 

His neck, or thought to spare his clothes.” + 

And Helen liked the end, too, that Father always brought out with a special accent, the way the farmer didn’t give up. As he started silently and doggedly back the long way around, miles and miles in the cold, she walked along beside him, sharing something of his quiet resistance to Fate. That was the way to do when you’d slid all out of the way you wanted to go! + 

Father read another one after that about a bonfire, which, although she did not quite understand it all, always made Helen tremble with excitement. Henry did not understand any of it and did not try to. It never bothered him now when he did not understand the poems Father read to Helen. He just stopped listening and played with his puppy’s ear, and lost himself in the warm, soft heaviness of the puppy’s little sprawling body on his knees. Sometimes he put his face lovingly down on the little dog’s head, his heart melting with tenderness. He needed no poetry out of a book. + 

“It will have roared first and mixed sparks with stars, + 

And sweeping round it with a flaming sword, + 

Made the dim trees stand back in wider circles.” + 

“Oh,” cried Helen, loving the sound of the words as Henry loved his puppy, “isn’t that just scrumptious!” + 

“The breezes were so spent with winter blowing + 

They seemed to fail the bluebirds under them + 

Short of the perch their languid flight was towards; + 

And my flame made a pinnacle to heaven.” + 

“Oh, Father,” said Helen, wriggling on her chair with delight, “isn’t it too lovely!” And then, in a passion of longing, “Oh, I wish I could write like that!” + 

Something in the expression of her father’s face struck her. She was only thirteen, but an older intuition from her coming womanhood made her say impulsively, with all her heart, “Father, you love it so⁠ ⁠… why don’t you⁠ ⁠… didn’t you ever try to write poetry, too?” + 

To her confusion, a slow, deep flush mounted all over her father’s face. He looked down at the book in silence. + 

Helen was as horrified as if she had flung open the door of a secret sanctuary in a temple. She jumped up from the sofa, and not understanding her father, nor herself, nor what she was doing, “Oh, Father, dear,” she murmured, her arms around his neck. + 

Henry and his puppy looked up at them sleepily. “Is it bedtime?” asked Henry. + 

Helen went to sleep that night, still feeling the great hug Father had given her. She had never felt Father love her so much before. + 

Downstairs before he went to bed her father, turning over the pages of a book, was reading, + 

“And nothing to look backward to with pride, + 

And nothing to look forward to with hope.” + 

“Come, come!” he said to himself. “Terence, this is stupid stuff, you eat your victuals fast enough. We’ll have to call this day one of our failures. I’d better get it over with and start another.” His heart was still bleeding to the old wound he had thought healed and forgotten for years, which Helen’s sudden question had torn open. Good Heavens, weren’t you safe from those old buried griefs until you were actually under the sod? + 

And yet mingled with the old bitterness was a new sweetness, Helen’s sympathy, Helen’s understanding. It had never occurred to him before that children could give something as well as take all⁠—the all he was so thankful to give them. Why, he thought wistfully, Helen might be the companion he had never had. He shook his head. No, that would not be fair to her. No dead-hand business! She must find her companions in her own generation. He must be ready to stand aside and let her pass on when the time came. That new sweetness was offered to him only that he might learn to make another renunciation. + 

He looked about him to see if there was anything to be done for the house before he went to bed. “Shall I close that window over there?” he thought to himself. “No, the night is warm. It will give us more air.” + 

He wheeled himself to the closed door of the dining-room, opened it and perceived that the wind was blowing hard from the other direction, for a strong draught instantly sucked past him between the open window back of him and the open window at the head of Stephen’s bed. He felt the gust and saw the long, light curtain curl eddying out towards him over the flicker of Stephen’s bedside candle. + 

It caught in an instant. It flared up like guncotton, all over its surface. It came dropping down⁠ ⁠… horribly dropping down towards Stephen’s unconscious, upturned face⁠ ⁠… flames on that tender flesh! + 

Stephen’s father found himself standing by the bed, snatching the curtain to one side, crushing out the flames between his hands. His wheel chair still stood by the open door. + 

The draught between the two open windows now blew out the candle abruptly. In the darkness the door slammed shut with a loud report. + 

But the room was not dark to Lester. As actually as he had seen and felt the burst of flame from the curtain, he now felt himself flare up in physical ecstasy to be standing on his own feet, to know that he had taken a dozen steps, to know that he was no longer a half-man, a mutilated wreck from whom normal people averted their eyes in what they called pity but what was really contempt and disgust. + 

He was like a man who has been shut in a cage too low for him to stand, who has crouched and stooped and bowed his shoulders, and who suddenly is set free to rise to his full stature, to throw his arms up over his head. The relief from oppression was as rending as a pain. It was a thousand times more joyful than any joy he had ever known. His self, his ego, savagely, grimly, harshly beaten down as it had been, sprang up with an exultant yell. + 

The flame of its exultation flared up like guncotton, as the curtain had flared. + 

And died down as quickly, crushed and ground to blackness between giant hands that snatched it to one side as it dropped down towards Stephen’s unconscious upturned face⁠ ⁠… flames on that tender flesh.⁠ ⁠… + 

Lester knew nothing but that there was blackness within and without him. He was lying fully dressed across the foot of his bed. His face was buried in the bedclothes, but it was no blacker there than in the room⁠ ⁠… in his heart. + 

What made it so black? He did not know. He was beyond thought. He was nothing but wild, quivering apprehension, as he had been in the instant when, poised on the icy roof, he had turned to hurl himself down into the void. The terror of that instant was with him again. What fall was before him now? + 

He went a little insane as he lay there on the bed. He seemed to himself to be falling, as he had fallen so many times during his convalescence, endlessly, endlessly, in a dread that grew worse because now he knew what unutterable anguish awaited him. He shuddered, grasped the blanket and tore at it savagely, wondering madly what it was⁠ ⁠… what it was⁠ ⁠… what it was.⁠ ⁠… + 

He came to himself with a great start that shook him, that shook the bed so that it rattled in the dark silent room. + 

He sat up and wiped his face that was dripping wet. + 

Now what? His mind was lucid. He was not falling, he was on his bed, in his room, with Stephen sleeping beside him in the darkness. And he knew now that he could get well. + 

Well, what was he to do, now that he knew he could get well? + 

He knew beforehand that there was nothing he could do. Life had once more cast him out from the organization of things. + 

Could he do any better than before his miserable, poorly done, detested work? Could he hate it any less? No, he would hate it a thousand times more now that he knew that it was not only a collaboration with materialism fatly triumphant, but that it kept him from his real work, vital, living, creative work, work he could do as no one else could, work that meant the salvation of his own children. Could he sit again sunk in that treacherous bog of slavery to possessions, doing his share of beckoning unsuspecting women into it⁠ ⁠… and all the time know that perhaps at that very minute Helen was repressing timidly some sweet shy impulse that would fester in her heart when it might have blossomed into fragrance in the sun? It would drive him mad to see again in Helen’s eyes that old stupid, crushed expression of self-distrustful discouragement which he had always thought was the natural expression of her nature. + 

He thought of Henry, leaping and running with his dog, both of them casting off sparkling rays of youth as they capered. He thought of Henry ghastly white, shrunken, emptied of vitality, as he lay on the bed that last evening of the old life, in the condition which they had all thought was the inevitable one for Henry. + 

And Eva.⁠ ⁠… He gave a deep groan as he thought of Eva⁠—Eva who loved the work he hated, who took it all simple-heartedly at the solemnly preposterous value that the world put on it⁠—to shut that strong-flying falcon into the barnyard again, to watch her rage, and droop, and tear at her own heart and at the children’s! + 

Solemnly, out of the darkness, as though it had been Stephen’s voice reciting “The Little Boy Lost” to him, he heard, + 

“Father, father, where are you going? + 

Oh, do not walk so fast. + 

Speak, father, speak to your little boy + 

Or else I shall be lost.” + 

And there was Stephen.⁠ ⁠… + 

Lester had no words for what the name meant to him now⁠—nothing but a great aching sorrow into which he sank helplessly, letting its black waves close over his head. + 

Presently he struggled up to the air again and looked about him. There must be some way of escape. Anybody but a weakling would invent some way to save them all. He must leave nothing unthought of, he must start methodically to make the rounds of the possibilities. He must not lose his head in this hysterical way. He must be a man and master circumstances. + 

Would it be possible for both of them to work, he and Eva? Other parents did sometimes. The idea was that with the extra money you made you hired somebody to take care of the children. If before his accident anyone had dreamed of Eva’s natural gift for business, he would have thought the plan an excellent one. But it was only since his accident that he had had the faintest conception of what “caring for the children” might mean. Now, now that he had lived with the children, now that he had seen how it took all of his attention to make even a beginning of understanding them, how it took all of his intelligence and love to try to give them what they needed, spiritually and mentally⁠ ⁠… no! + 

You could perhaps, if you were very lucky⁠—though it was unlikely in the extreme⁠—it was conceivable that by paying a high cash price you might be able to hire a little intelligence, enough intelligence to give them good material care. But you could never hire intelligence sharpened by love. In other words you could not hire a parent. And children without parents were orphans. + 

Whom could they hire? What kind of a person would it be? He tried to think concretely of the possibilities. Why⁠—he gave a sick, horrified laugh⁠—why, very likely some nice old grandmotherly soul like Mrs. Anderson who, so everybody would say, would be just the right person, because she had had so much experience with children. He clenched his hands in a murderous animal-fury at the thought of Stephen’s proud, strong, vital spirit left helpless to the vicious, vindictive meanness of a Mrs. Anderson. And from the outside, coming in late in the afternoon with no firsthand information about what happened during the day, how could he and Eva ever know a Mrs. Anderson from anyone else? + 

Well, perhaps not a Mrs. Anderson. Let him think of the very best that might conceivably be possible. Perhaps a good-natured, young houseworker who would be kind to the children, indulgent, gentle. He thought of the long hours during which he bent his utmost attention on the children to understand them, to see what kind of children they were, to think what they needed most now⁠—not little passing pleasures such as good nature and indulgence would suggest, but real food for what was deepest in them. He thought of how he used his close hourly contact with them as a means of looking into their minds and hearts; how he used the work-in-common with them as a scientist conducts an experiment station to accumulate data as material for his intelligence to arrange in order, so that his decisions might be just and farsighted as well as loving. He thought how in the blessed mental leisure which comes with small mechanical tasks he pored over this data, considered it and reconsidered in the light of some newer evidence⁠—where was now a good-natured young hired girl, let her be ever so indulgent and gentle? “You can’t hire somebody to be a parent for your children!” he thought again, passionately. They are born into the world asking you for bread. If you give them a stone, it were better for you that that stone were hanged about your neck and cast into the sea. + 

Eva had no bread to give them⁠—he saw that in this Day-of-Judgment hour, and no longer pretended that he did not. Eva had passionate love and devotion to give them, but neither patience nor understanding. There was no sacrifice in the world which she would not joyfully make for her children except to live with them. They had tried that for fourteen dreadful years and knew what it brought them. That complacent unquestioned generalization, “The mother is the natural homemaker”; what a juggernaut it had been in their case! How poor Eva, drugged by the cries of its devotees, had cast herself down under its grinding wheels⁠—and had dragged the children in under with her. It wasn’t because Eva had not tried her best. She had nearly killed herself trying. But she had been like a gifted mathematician set to paint a picture. + 

And he did have bread for them. He did not pretend he had not. He had found that he was in possession of miraculous loaves which grew larger as he dealt them out. For the first time since his untried youth Lester knew a moment of pride in himself, of satisfaction with something he had done. He thought of Henry, normal, sound, growing as a vigorous young sapling grows. He thought of Helen opening into perfumed blossom like a young fruit tree promising a rich harvest; of Stephen, growing as a strong man grows, purposeful, energetic, rejoicing in his strength, and loving, yes, loving. How good Stephen was to him! That melting upward look of protecting devotion when he had laced up his shoes that morning! + 

“Father, father, where are you going? + 

Oh, do not walk so fast!” + 

Well, there was the simple, obvious possibility, the natural, right human thing to do⁠ ⁠… he could continue to stay at home and make the home, since a homemaker was needed. + 

He knew this was impossible. The instant he tried to consider it, he knew it was as impossible as to roll away a mountain from his path with his bare hands. He knew that from the beginning of time everything had been arranged to make that impossible. Every unit in the whole of society would join in making it impossible, from the Ladies’ Guild to the children in the public schools. It would be easier for him to commit murder or rob a bank than to give his intelligence where it was most needed, in his own home with his children. + 

“What is your husband’s business, Mrs. Knapp?” + 

“He hasn’t any. He stays at home and keeps house.” + 

“Oh.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He heard that “Oh!” reverberating infernally down every road he tried. + 

“My Papa is an insurance agent. What does your Papa do for a living, Helen?” + 

“He doesn’t do anything. Mother makes the living. Father stays home with us children.” + 

“Oh, is he sick?” + 

“No, he’s not sick.” + 

“Oh.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He saw Helen, sensitive, defenseless Helen cringing before that gigantic “oh.” He knew that soon Henry with his normal reactions would learn to see that “oh” coming, to hide from it, to avoid his playmates because of it. There was no sense to that “oh”; there had been no sense for generations and generations. It was an exclamation that dated from the cave-age, but it still had power to warp the children’s lives as much as⁠—yes, almost as much as leaving them to a Mrs. Anderson. They would be ashamed of him. He would lose his influence over them. He would be of no use to them. + 

Over his head Tradition swung a bludgeon he knew he could not parry. He had always guessed at the presence of that Tradition ruling the world, guessed that it hated him, guessed at its real name. He saw it plain now, grinning sardonically high above all the little chattering pretenses of idealism. He knew now what it decreed: that men are in the world to get possessions, to create material things, to sell them, to buy them, to transport them, above all to stimulate to fever-heat the desire for them in all human beings. It decreed that men are of worth in so far as they achieve that sort of material success, and worthless if they do not. + 

That was the real meaning of the unctuous talk of “service” in the commercial textbooks which Eva read so wholeheartedly. They were intended to fix the human attention altogether on the importance of material things; to make women feel that the difference between linen and cotton is of more importance to them than the fine, difficultly drawn, always-varying line between warm human love and lust; to make men feel that more possessions would enlarge their lives⁠ ⁠… blasphemy! Blasphemy! + 

He read as little as possible of the trade-journals which Eva left lying around the house, but the other day in kindling a fire with one his eye had been caught by a passage the phrases of which had fixed themselves in that sensitive verbal memory of his and were not to be dislodged:⁠—“Morally, esthetically, emotionally and commercially, America is helped, uplifted, advanced by the efforts of you and me to induce individual Americans first to want and then to acquire more of the finer things of life. Take fine jewelry. It makes the purchaser a better person by its appeal to the emotional and esthetic side of his or her nature.⁠ ⁠… Desire for the rich and tasteful adornments obtainable at the jewelry store expresses itself in stronger attempts to acquire the means to purchase. This means advancement for America! Should you not, bearing this wonderful thought in mind, be enthused to broaden your contact with the buying public by increasing your distributing.⁠ ⁠…” They wrote that sort of thing by the yard, by the mile! And they were right. That was the real business of life, of course. He had always known it. That was why men who did other things, teachers, or poets, or musicians, or ministers, were so heartily despised by normal people. And as for any man who might try to be a parent.⁠ ⁠… + 

Why, the fanatic feminists were right, after all. Under its greasy camouflage of chivalry, society is really based on a contempt for women’s work in the home. The only women who were paid, either in human respect or in money, were women who gave up their traditional job of creating harmony out of human relationships and did something really useful, bought or sold or created material objects. As for any man’s giving his personality to the woman’s work of trying to draw out of children the best there might be in them⁠ ⁠… fiddling foolishness! Leave it to the squaws! He was sure that he was the only man who had ever conceived even the possibility of such a lapse from virile self-respect as to do what all women are supposed to do. He knew well enough that other men would feel for such a conception on his part a stupefaction only equaled by their red-blooded scorn. + 

At this he caught a passing glimpse far below the surface. He knew that it was not only scorn he would arouse, but suspicion and alarm. For an instant he understood why Tradition was so intolerant of the slightest infraction of the respect due to it, why it was ready to tear him and all his into a thousand pieces rather than permit even one variation from its standard. It was because the variation he had conceived ran counter to the prestige of sacred possessions. Not only was it beneath the dignity of any able-bodied brave to try to show young human beings how to create rich, deep, happy lives without great material possessions, but it was subversive of the wholehearted worship due to possessions. It was heresy. It must be stopped at all costs. Lester heard the threatening snarl of that unsuspected, unquestioned Tradition, amazed that anyone dared so much as to conceive of an attack on it. And he knew that he was not man enough to stand up and resist the bludgeon and the snarl. + 

He had thought he had experienced all the possible ways in which a man can feel contempt for himself. But there was another depth before him. For⁠—he might as well have the poor merit of being honest about it, and not hide behind Eva and the children⁠—he knew that he could stand that “oh⁠ ⁠…” as little as they, that he would turn feebly sour and bitter under it, as he had before, and blame other people for what was his own lack of endurance. + 

Let him try to imagine it for an instant⁠—a definite instance. If he were once more an able-bodied man what would he feel to have Harvey Bronson drop in and find him making a bed while Eva sold goods? + 

Good God! Was he such a miserable cur as to let the thought of Harvey Bronson’s sneer stand between him and doing what he knew was best for the children? There they stood, infinitely precious, hungering and thirsting for what he had to give them⁠ ⁠… defenseless but for him. Would he stand back and let the opinion of the Ladies’ Guild.⁠ ⁠… + 

Yes, he would. + 

That was the kind of miserable cur he was. And now he knew it. He wiped the sweat from his face and ground his teeth together to keep them from chattering. + 

They were chattering like those of a man cast adrift in a boat with only a broken paddle between him and the roaring leap of a cataract. The roaring was louder and louder in his ears as he felt himself helplessly drifting towards the drop. He had not been willing to look at it, had kept his eyes on the shores which he had tried so vainly to reach, struggling pitifully with his poor broken tool. + 

Now he gave up and, cowering in a heap, waited dumbly for the crashing downfall⁠—he who had fallen so low, was he to fall again, lower still? He who had thought he had kept nothing at all for himself in life, must he give up now his one living treasure, his self-respect? Could it be that he was thinking⁠—he, Lester Knapp!⁠—of shamming a sickness he did not have, of trampling his honor deep into the filth of small, daily lies? + 

The thought carried him with a rush over the wicked gleaming curve at the edge of the abyss⁠ ⁠… he was falling⁠ ⁠… falling.⁠ ⁠… + 

There was nothing but a formless horror of yelling whirlpools, which sucked him down.⁠ ⁠… + 

Presently it was dawn. A faint gray showed at the windows. The blemishes on the ceiling came into view and stalked grimly to their accustomed stand in his brain. The night was over. Stephen lay sleeping peacefully, the harmless, blackened bits of the burned curtain scattered about his bed. + 

“Father, father, where are you going? + 

Oh, do not walk so fast. + 

Speak, father, speak to.⁠ ⁠…” + 

It was not fast he would be walking. Or at all. + 

A robin chirped sleepily in the maple. It would soon be day. Lester got up, shuffled over to his wheel chair and sat down in it. + 

After a time he stooped down and unlaced his shoes. Then he wheeled himself over beside Stephen’s bed and waited for the day to come. + 

XXII + 

Dr. Merritt had telephoned Mrs. Knapp that he was going to make some very special tests of her husband’s condition that afternoon, tests which might be conclusive as to the possibility of recovery. He had chosen Sunday, he told her, because he wished her to be at home. He tried to make his voice sound weighty and warning, and he knew that he had succeeded when, on arriving at the house, he found Mrs. Farnham there, with a very sober face, twisting her handkerchief nervously in her hands. + 

The two women looked at him in silent anxiety as he came in. He asked with an impenetrable professional manner to have his patient’s chair rolled into the next room. “It is always better to make those nerve-reflex tests in perfect quiet,” he explained. + 

Mr. Knapp with no comment rolled his chair back into the dining-room, and the doctor closed the door. + 

In a few moments, Helen, very pale, with frightened eyes, came in to join the waiting women. She found them as pale as she, motionless in their chairs, her mother’s lips trembling. She sat down on a stool beside Aunt Mattie, who patted her shoulder and said something in a tremulous whisper which Helen did not catch. From the other room, from behind the closed door, came a low murmur of voices broken by long pauses. There was no other sound except Stephen’s shout as he played with Henry’s dog in the back yard. + 

More voices from behind the closed door, very low, very restrained, a mere breath which Helen could catch only by straining her ears. She could not even be sure whether it were the doctor or Father who was talking. Another long silence. Helen’s heart pounded and pounded. She wished she could hide her face in Aunt Mattie’s lap, but she could not move⁠—not till she knew. + 

Had she heard the voices again? Yes. No. There was no sound from the next room. + 

Then, as though the doctor had been standing there all the time, his hand on the knob, the door suddenly opened. + 

Now that the time had come the doctor found it hard to get the words out. He could not think of any way to begin. The three waiting women looked at him, imploring him silently to end their suspense. + 

He cleared his throat, sat down, looked in his case for something which he did not find and shut the case with a click. As if this had been a signal, he then said hastily, in an expressionless voice, “Mrs. Knapp, I might as well be frank with you. I do not think it best to go on with the treatment I have been trying for your husband. I am convinced from the result of the tests today.⁠ ⁠…” + 

His fingers played nervously with his watch chain. “I am convinced, I say, that⁠ ⁠… that it would be very unwise to continue making an attempt to cure this local trouble. The nervous system of the human body, you understand, is so closely interrelated that when you touch one part you never know what.⁠ ⁠… The thing which we doctors must take into consideration is the total reaction on the patient. That is the weak point with so many specialists. They consider only the immediate seat of the trouble and not the sum-total of the effect on the patient. You often hear them say of an operation that killed the patient that it was a ‘success.’ And in the case of spinal trouble like Mr. Knapp’s, of course the entire nervous system is.⁠ ⁠… What I have said applies of course very especially when it is a case of.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He saw from the strained, drawn expression on Mrs. Farnham’s face that she did not understand a word he was saying, and brought out with desperate bluntness, “The fact is that it would be a waste of time for me to continue my weekly visits. I now realize that it would be very dangerous for Mr. Knapp ever to try to use his legs. Crutches perhaps, later. But he must never be allowed to make the attempt to go without crutches. It might be.⁠ ⁠…” He drew a long breath and said it. “It might be fatal.” + 

When he finished he looked very grim and disagreeable, and, opening his case once more, began to fumble among the little bottles in it. God! Why did any honest man ever take up the practice of medicine? + 

Back of him, through the open door, Lester Knapp could be seen in his wheel chair, his head fallen back on the headrest, his long face white, a resolute expression of suffering in his eyes. + 

Mrs. Farnham began to cry softly into her handkerchief, her shoulders shaking, the sound of her muffled sobs loud in the hushed room. + 

Mrs. Knapp had turned very white at the doctor’s first words and was silent a long time when he finished. Then she said rather faintly but with her usual firmness, “It is very hard of course for a.⁠ ⁠…” She caught herself and began again, “It is very hard, of course, but we must all do the best we can.” + 

Helen tiptoed softly into the kitchen and out on the back porch, closing the kitchen door behind her carefully. Then she took one jump from the porch to the walk and ran furiously out to the chicken-yard where Henry and Stephen were feeding the chickens. + 

At least Stephen was feeding the chickens. Henry was looking anxiously towards the house, and the moment he saw Helen come out, started back on a run to meet her. As he ran his shadowed face caught light from hers. + 

“It’s all right!” she told him in a loud whisper as they came together. “The doctor says that Father never can be cured, that he’ll always have to go on crutches.” + 

“Oh, Helen!” said Henry, catching desperately at her arm. “Are you sure? Are you sure?” + 

His mouth began to work nervously, and he crooked his arm over his face to hide it. + 

“What’s the matter of you?” asked Stephen, running up alarmed. Helen got down on her knees and put her arm around the little boy. Her voice was trembling as she said, “Stevie, dear, Father’s going to stay right with us. He’s never going to go away.” + 

Stephen looked at her appalled. His rosy face paled to white. “Was he going to go away from us?” he asked, horrified. + 

“Why, of course, he’d have to, to work, if the doctor could cure him. But the doctor says he can’t. He says Father never will.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Stephen had been glaring into her face to make sure he understood. He now pushed her from him roughly and ran at top speed towards the house. + 

He bounded up on the porch, he burst open the door, the house was filled with the clamor of his passionate, questing call of “Father! Fa‑a‑ather!” + 