III
The family were at supper. The dining room was exquisitely neat. The Lithuanian girl shoved the dishes in hot through the slide and set them down on the table without noise: Grandpa always said his youngest daughter could have taught an Eskimo to wait on table. The faces under the hanging lamp reflected something of the comfort and satisfaction of the scene. Pearl had got an advance of salary, and Mr. Weston had put through the sale of an old business building at a price even he had not hoped for.
“I guess we’ll take that vacation at the Lakes you girls are always talking about,” he said, and glanced about the table for approval. But Mrs. Weston wrinkled her mouth (she frowned with her mouth as other people do with their foreheads), and said, wouldn’t they better let the Lakes alone this year and put in that new electric cold-storage affair the drummer had called about day before yesterday, and taken the measures for? He said they’d get it at a big reduction if they gave the order now, and paid down a third of the amount when he called back.
Pearl, the eldest daughter, who was small and brisk, with a mouth like her mother’s, said, well, she didn’t much care, only she’d like to know sometime soon what they’d decided, because if they didn’t go to the Lakes she thought she’d go camping with a friend at the School of Hope, in Sebaska County; but the younger, Mae, who was taller and less compact, with an uncertain promise of prettiness, murmured that the other girls’ folks all got away to the Lakes for August, and she didn’t see why they shouldn’t without such a fuss.
“Well, we’ve got you and Vance to fuss about, for one thing,” Mrs. Weston replied. “Here you are, seventeen and nineteen, and not knowing yet how you’re going to earn your living, or when you’re going to begin.”
Mae, in an irritated tone, rejoined that she knew well enough what she wanted to do; she wanted to go to Chicago and study art, like Leila Duxberry—
“Oh, Chicago! There’ll be an art school right here next year, in connection with the college, just as good, and nothing like as expensive,” said Mrs. Weston, who was always jealous of any signs of independence in her flock.
Mae shrugged, and cast her eyes toward the ceiling, as if to say that conversation on any lower level had no further interest for her.
Mr. Weston drummed on the table, and took a second helping of pickles. “Well, and what about Advance G. Weston, Esq.? Got any idea what you planning to specialize in, sonny?”
Vance opened his lips to answer. He had always known that his father wanted him to be a real estate man, not only wanted but meant him to be, indeed could not conceive of any other career for him, whatever the women said, or the boy’s own view of his vocation was, any more than a king on a well-established throne could picture any job but kingship for his heir. The Free Speaker had once headlined Mr. Weston as the King of Drake County Realtors and Mr. Weston had accepted the title with a modest dignity. Vance knew all this; but the time for temporizing was over. He meant to answer his father then and there, and to say: “I guess I’d better go on a newspaper.” For he had made up his mind to be a writer, and if possible a poet, and he had never heard of any way to Parnassus save that which led through the columns of the daily press, and ranged from baseball reports to the exposure of business scandals. But as he was about to speak, something hot and choking welled up into his throat, and the brightly lit definite table with the dull definite faces about it suddenly melted into a mist.
He pushed back his chair uncertainly. “I’ve got a headache—I guess I’ll go upstairs,” he muttered to the whirling room. He saw the surprise in their faces, and became aware of Pearl vaguely detaching herself from the blur and moving toward him, anxious, inquisitive; but he pushed her back, gasping: “All right … don’t fuss … Oh, just leave me alone, can’t you, all of you?” and got himself out of the room, and upstairs to his own, where he fell on his bed in a storm of dry sobs without a tear. …
Two of the doctors said it was a malarial microbe; possibly he’d been bitten by an anopheles mosquito in those marshy fields out toward Crampton, or down by the river. The third doctor, a bacteriologist from the college laboratory, thought it was walking typhoid, and he might likely as not have picked it up drinking the river water, if he was in the habit of going out to Crampton—family living there? Oh, that it?—Well, the Crampton water was rank poison; they had a good many cases of the same sort every spring and summer. … That doctor was never sent for again; and the family noticed that Lorin Weston suddenly began to move once more in the matter of carrying the Euphoria water out to Crampton. The question was always a troublesome one; whenever it was raised it stirred up a hornet’s nest of other matters connected with municipal and state politics, questions of the let-sleeping-dogs-lie sort; and it had been a relief
