it. It’s always been my notion that the land was made for man,
just as it’s old Dawson’s that man was created to work the land.
I don’t mind your siding with the Dawsons in this difference of
opinion, if you can get their results.”
Mrs. Wheeler rose and slipped quickly from the room, feeling her
way down the dark staircase to the kitchen. It was dusky and
quiet there. Mahailey sat in a corner, hemming dish-towels by the
light of a smoky old brass lamp which was her own cherished
luminary. Mrs. Wheeler walked up and down the long room in soft,
silent agitation, both hands pressed tightly to her breast, where
there was a physical ache of sympathy for Claude.
She remembered kind Tom Wested. He had stayed over night with
them several times, and had come to them for consolation after
his wife died. It seemed to her that his decline in health and
loss of courage, Mr. Wheeler’s fortuitous trip to Denver, the old
pine-wood farm in Maine; were all things that fitted together and
made a net to envelop her unfortunate son. She knew that he had
been waiting impatiently for the autumn, and that for the first
time he looked forward eagerly to going back to school. He was
homesick for his friends, the Erlichs, and his mind was all the
time upon the history course he meant to take.
Yet all this would weigh nothing in the family councils probably
he would not even speak of it—and he had not one substantial
objection to offer to his father’s wishes. His disappointment
would be bitter. “Why, it will almost break his heart,” she
murmured aloud. Mahailey was a little deaf and heard nothing. She
sat holding her work up to the light, driving her needle with a
big brass thimble, nodding with sleepiness between stitches.
Though Mrs. Wheeler was scarcely conscious of it, the old woman’s
presence was a comfort to her, as she walked up and down with her
drifting, uncertain step.
She had left the sitting-room because she was afraid Claude might
get angry and say something hard to his father, and because she
couldn’t bear to see him hectored. Claude had always found life
hard to live; he suffered so much over little things,-and she
suffered with him. For herself, she never felt disappointments.
Her husband’s careless decisions did not disconcert her. If he
declared that he would not plant a garden at all this year, she
made no protest. It was Mahailey who grumbled. If he felt like
eating roast beef and went out and killed a steer, she did the
best she could to take care of the meat, and if some of it
spoiled she tried not to worry. When she was not lost in
religious meditation, she was likely to be thinking about some
one of the old books she read over and over. Her personal life
was so far removed from the scene of her daily activities that
rash and violent men could not break in upon it. But where Claude
was concerned, she lived on another plane, dropped into the lower
air, tainted with human breath and pulsating with poor, blind,
passionate human feelings.
It had always been so. And now, as she grew older, and her flesh
