“Yes! I suppose I am incapable of appreciating him. Well, you seem to at any rate,” Nannie taunted.
Lucy paused ominously.
“Well, Mamma, if you don’t like him, I can’t help it,” she resumed at last in an odd strained voice. “He’s our friend, but I’m not responsible for him or his opinions. You’ll just have to like him or dislike him for yourself.”
“I never said I disliked him,” retorted Nannie. “I said he disliked me. Anyone would think to hear you talk that he was—”
“Suppose we don’t discuss it any longer, Mamma,” Lucy interrupted shortly.
“Oh, very well. If I had known you couldn’t bear to have the slightest hint of criticism of him I’d have kept still.”
Lucy said no more.
XII
The friendship between John and Jim was of the sort that has its roots deep in the past. They had been playmates and chums since early childhood.
Jim was two years the elder and one of his first memories was of wishing he had a mother like John’s. His own mother had died when he was an infant and Mrs. Winter gave the lonely child many a happy hour mothering him along with her own child.
Jim’s father, a dry minded man who owned a hardware store, was mystified by the boy’s quaint fancies.
“Are the flowers lonesome at night?” the child asked Mr. Sprague one day. And once when it was raining he said, “The sky is crying and the trees are sorry,” as the latter bent in the wind.
His father always laughed at such speeches and advised him not to be a fool. At first Jim would slip from the room and weep, but later he learned to conceal his hurt feelings as his father whipped him if he found him crying. So the child gradually acquired the habit of keeping his thoughts to himself.
Though Jim’s faith in things mystical had in early childhood been the most eager and ardent, he was the first of the two boys to become a sceptic. Mr. Sprague in his hardware store had a business which seemed to be an appropriate emblem of his nature, and he had never attempted to meet his imaginative son halfway; but it was Jim’s own habit of inquiry regarding the world around him, rather than the fault of his unsympathetic parent, which brought about a change in his childish outlook.
“I don’t believe in Santa Claus any more, John,” he confessed the first Christmas after his faith had forsaken him.
“Well I do!” John answered indignantly. “He’s going to bring me a new sled too. You’re jealous because he’s not going to bring you one.” And John ran away out of earshot of heresy.
Jim went home and threw himself face downward on the bed in the bare room where he and his father slept. While he lay there he admitted to himself that he was jealous of John but that did not alter his painfully won conviction.
Jim loved companionship with animals. A tailless cat, a lame gosling, chickens, and anything else that needed care, shared his affection. If one of these outcasts became ill he ministered to it as though it were a baby. One Sunday he sat for three hours holding a dying puppy in his lap.
Mr. Sprague did not like pets and was often cruel to Jim’s charges, refusing food for them. Then Jim would deny himself and save the food from his plate for his protégés. His father grew angry at this, regarding it as disobedience to the spirit of his commands, and one day ordered Jim to turn the pets loose, in his rage kicking a little puppy. Jim rebelled and, as was usual on such occasions, was whipped. As soon as his father released him Jim gathered up the hurt puppy tenderly. After this he tried to keep his pets out of his father’s sight.
At school John was, as a rule, the head of his class, but Jim always had to help him with his mathematical problems. Jim never obtained more than fair marks except in mental arithmetic, in which study he rapidly became the pride of all his teachers.
Although Jim took the initiative and led in all their games and expeditions it was tacitly understood that John was, in some way, the superior of the two. This tradition dated from their earliest memories. It was not founded solely on the fact that John had a mother, for John’s father, too, was a cultured man and wrote for a religious review, while Jim’s only sold hardware. Even in later years when Jim faced life and weighed values this attitude never quite left him.
During their high school days John fell in love with Gertie Pierce, who had red cheeks and yellow hair. This lifted him still higher in Jim’s opinion. John wrote poetry about Gertie, which he read to Jim. In these poems he called her a “dryad,” explaining to Jim what the word meant, and pointing out how beautifully it rhymed with “sad.”
As a rule Jim paid scant attention to his girl acquaintances and schoolmates. They made him uneasy with their giggling and whispering, and he always imagined that they were talking about him and making fun of him.
After his graduation from high school Jim entered his father’s store. It had been decided that John was to go to college and he left the following autumn. Jim, robbed of the old companionship, felt his isolation more than ever before in his life. He wanted something, he hardly knew what. It seemed to him that life was cheating him, but he looked in vain for understanding from the boys and girls with whom he had grown up. Occasional enthusiastic letters from John in which college life was described to the stay-at-home, not without a note of condescension, added to Jim’s dissatisfaction and unrest.
One day, about a month after John’s departure to attend college, a young widow of the town, Mrs. Johnson, whom Jim had often seen on the street and
