“You seem to have lots of trees around everywhere,” he remarked to Upton, wishing he could think of something more striking to say.
“Aren’t there as many out your way?” Upton rejoined.
“I dunno,” Vance mumbled, suddenly on his guard against admitting any inferiority in Euphoria, even to the amount of shade afforded by its trees. “I suppose they’re just different—the way everything else is,” he added.
Mrs. Tracy, who now appeared on the doorstep, was certainly different—not only from the gay bride in showy pink who had dazzled her western relatives on her wedding tour, but also from any of the women of Vance’s family. She was small and slight, like Mrs. Weston, but without the latter’s sharpness of outline and incisiveness of manner. There was something fluctuant and shadowy about Mrs. Tracy, as there was about her overshaded dooryard; but she had a kind of phantom prettiness, something seen through a veil not so much of years as of failure. She looked, not careless of her beauty, like Grandma Scrimser, but disheartened about it, as Vance suspected she was about everything else in life. But the sweetness of her smile of welcome was something his own mother could not have compassed. “I guess it’ll be all right here,” Vance thought, his contracted nerves relaxing.
“You look very tired; the journey must have been awful. Come right in and have some supper,” Mrs. Tracy said, slipping her arm through his.
It was funny—but pleasant, too, as a novelty—sitting around a table lit by a queer smelly oil lamp with an engraved globe on it, in a little dining room with a dark brown wallpaper and an unwieldy protruding sideboard which had evidently been picked up at a bargain because it wouldn’t fit in anywhere. Mrs. Tracy sat opposite, smiling at Vance wistfully across the teacups, and asking gentle questions about everybody out at Euphoria. She remembered what a pretty little house the Westons had lived in at Advance, when she’d gone there on her honeymoon, and Vance was a baby; and when Vance smiled away her commendation, and said they’d got a much bigger house now at Euphoria, she replied that she supposed his mother’d made it all lovely, and then rambled off to questions about the wonderful Grandma Scrimser and Aunt Saidie Toler. Vance noticed that she remembered a great deal more about all of them than they did about her, and he said to himself that she had what Grandma Scrimser called a Family Bible sort of mind.
Upton dropped into the seat between his mother and Vance, and while the meal was in progress a thin fair girl in a pale blue blouse and a very short skirt wandered into the room, shook hands awkwardly with the newcomer, and seated herself in the remaining chair.
“Laura Lou’s always late—aren’t you?” Mrs. Tracy said, in her tone of smiling acceptance. “I presume your sisters aren’t always on time for meals, are they, Vance?”
Vance laughed, and said no, they drove his mother wild sometimes, and Laura Lou laughed too, but without looking at him, though his one glimpse of her heavy-lidded gray eyes with thick dark lashes made him desirous of another. Her face, however, was not pretty; too drawn and thin, like her brother’s, and with rather high cheekbones which Vance thought ugly, and ash blonde hair flopping untidily over her forehead. She was not more than fifteen, he conjectured, an age essentially uninteresting to him; and as she refused to talk, and drooped her head sheepishly over her plate of cold meat and potatoes (which he saw she hardly touched), Vance’s attention soon wandered from her. He had reached the stage of fatigue when everything about one is at once exciting and oppressive, and in spite of his friendly feeling toward his hosts he longed desperately for solitude and sleep.
But sleep was after all impossible. It was not the musty shut-up smell of his queer little room, nor the surprise of being unable to have a hot bath after his long cindery journey (the Tracy water supply being as primitive as their lighting and their means of locomotion); what kept him awake was something stronger even than youth’s exhaustless faculty of self-repair, of sleeping through, and in spite of, any number of anxieties and discomforts—a burning inward excitement shadowed but not overcome by his sense of vague disappointment.
Vance did not know exactly what he had expected of the East, except a general superabundance of all the things he had been taught to admire—taller houses, wider streets, fresher paint, more motors, telephones, plumbing, than Euphoria possessed, or could ever imagine achieving. Yet here he was in a town close to New York, and in a house belonging to people of his own standing—and he had been brought thither in a broken-down buggy, and the house was the shabbiest he had ever seen except Harrison Delaney’s, with none of the conveniences of civilized life, and kindly people who appeared too used to doing without them to make any excuse for their absence. Vance knew, by hearsay, of poverty; but almost all the people he had grown up among, if not as prosperous as his own family, were at least beyond any appearance of want; or rather, what they wanted, and felt the privation of, and hustled around to get were luxuries evidently not even aspired to by the Tracys. Vance supposed it came from the mysterious lack of vitality he felt in both Mrs. Tracy and her son; perhaps if Mr. Tracy hadn’t died years ago it would have been different. Certainly they wouldn’t have gone on ever since living in the same place and the same house—proof in itself of an absence of initiative which no Euphorian could understand. No, if Mr. Tracy had lived he would have got Upton onto a better job by this time (they left truck gardens to Poles and Dagoes at Euphoria), and he himself would have got a drive on, and moved to a live place,
