But Vance said, in that pale obstinate way he had acquired since his illness: “I want to go to New York. It’s easy enough to get down to the sea from there.”
Mr. Weston laughed. “Yes, but it ain’t so darned easy to get there first.” Vance was silent, and the family exchanged perturbed glances. But just then Mrs. Scrimser came lumbering in, cured of her rheumatism (by the “Spirit of Service” prayers—which unhappily had not succeeded with her husband), but moving heavily, as usual, with a stick to support her big rambling frame. She sat down among them in the sleeping porch, where Vance now took his daily rest cure, listened to their perplexity, and said with her dreamy prophetic smile: “There’s only once in a life when anybody wants one particular thing so bad that nothing else on earth’ll do instead. I wouldn’t wonder if wanting a thing that way wasn’t about the nearest we ever get to happiness.” She turned her softly humorous eyes on her grandson. “I guess Vanny’ll have to go East.”
It was then that Mrs. Weston remembered her cousin Lucilla Tracy’s postcard. “That place of Lorburn Tracy’s isn’t so far from New York,” she remarked, “up there on the Hudson. And Vance’d have good country air, anyhow, and good milk. May be Lucilla’d be glad to take him in as a boarder for a few weeks. I don’t believe they’re any too well off, from what she said last time she wrote to me. Since Lorburn’s death I guess she and the children have had pretty hard times making the two ends meet. Anyhow, I ought to answer that card. …”
Vance said nothing: the suggestion came to him as a surprise. He knew that Paul’s Landing, where his mother’s cousin lived, was not above an hour and a half by rail from New York, and his heart was beginning to beat excitedly, though he maintained an air of indifference.
But Lorin Weston was not indifferent. He seized on the suggestion as an unforseen way of indulging his son without too great an expenditure of money—an important consideration in view of the heavy cost of Vance’s illness, and the complications and embarrassments likely to result from Weston’s move in raising again the vexed question of the Crampton water supply.
“Say—why don’t we ring Lucilla up right now,” he suggested, getting to his feet with the haste of a man accustomed to prompt solution. Mrs. Weston raised no objection, and Mrs. Scrimser nodded approvingly. “That’s great, Lorin. I guess Lucilla’ll be only too glad. Her boy must be about Vanny’s age, mustn’t he, Marcia?” Marcia thought he must, and mother and daughter lost themselves in reminiscences of the early history of Lucilla Tracy, whom they had not seen since she had come out on a visit to them at Advance, years before, when Vance was a baby. The Tracys had been well-off then, and the young couple had been on their wedding trip to the Grand Canyon, and had stopped off on the way to see the bride’s western relatives. Mrs. Scrimser and Mrs. Weston recalled Lucilla as having been very pretty, with stylish New York clothes; they thought Mr. Tracy’s father owned a big “works” of some sort, on the Hudson; and he himself was editor of the principal newspaper at Paul’s Landing, where there had always been Tracys and Lorburns, since long before the Revolution, so he told them.
“Dear me, don’t it take you right back to Historic Times, hearing about things like that?” Grandma glowed reminiscently; but Mrs. Weston shivered a little at the opening of such interminable vistas. She liked to think of everybody living compactly and thrivingly, as she did herself, hemmed in by a prosperous present, and securely shut off from the icy draughts of an unknown past. “I guess the family’s going way back like that don’t always help the children to go forward,” she said sententiously; and at that very moment her husband reappeared with an announcement which seemed to confirm her worst suspicions. It was simply that the Tracys had no telephone.
No telephone! The Westons had never heard of such a case before. Mrs. Weston began by saying it couldn’t be possible, it must be a mistake, they were always making mistakes at the Information office; had Lorin said it was Mrs. Lorburn Tracy, at Paul’s Landing, New York? Was he sure he’d heard right? It simply couldn’t be, she reiterated, beginning to think that if it were, the Tracys must be “peculiar,” and she wouldn’t want to trust any child of hers to them, least of all Vance, after such an illness. She thought they’d better give up the idea altogether.
But Mrs. Scrimser was older, and her mind could reach back to days when, even in the enlightened West, she had known cases of people living in out-of-the-way places, or who were just simply too poor. …
“But I don’t want Vance to go to an out-of-the-way place. Suppose he was sick, how’d they ever get hold of a doctor?”
“Well, if it’s because they’re not well enough off,” her husband interrupted, “it’ll be a godsend to them to have Vance as
