“Money’s all right, but it’s not everything!” exclaimed John. “An artist has dreams that are more than meat and raiment. But it’s some job to achieve anything artistic in this country!”
“Or in any other country,” amended Jim.
“Well, ours is the limit,” John retorted. “That’s the reason I wanted to go to Europe—to drink in an atmosphere. To live and study where the almighty dollar isn’t supreme! I’ve tried to hang on to ideals, but grubbing for bread first drags you down to designing ugly cottages for fools and ends by offering you an incinerator. We’ll probably wind up on packing houses and the city dump yard.”
Jim laughed.
“Let’s get hold of the money, and then you can swim in early Tuscan and post-impressionism and dabble in watercolors all you want to.”
“Yes, money means opportunity to do the things we want to—for us and for Dimmie,” Lucy added more seriously.
“You two will have us running a contracting and jobbing concern before long, instead of an architect’s studio.”
“I’d run a fertilizer plant if there was money in it,” declared Jim.
“Well I wouldn’t, and I don’t think my boy would want advantages purchased at the cost of his father’s soul. Would you, son?” John rumpled Dimmie’s hair.
“I want a balloon,” remarked Dimmie.
“Heredity,” chuckled Jim, and Lucy laughed.
“You’re all atavism,” John retorted.
“What’s atavizzen?” queried Dimmie.
“Ask your uncle Jim, son.”
Dimmie looked at Jim who said, “I’ll bring you some next time I come out, Dimmie.”
“By the way, Lucy,” resumed John, “that reminds me. What train does your mother come on tomorrow?”
“On the seven o’clock, I think.” Lucy rose and took a letter from a drawer in the table by the kitchen door. “Seven ten C. and W.,” she corrected, consulting the letter.
“Morning or evening?”
“She didn’t say.” Lucy glanced again through the letter. “We’ll have to get a time table.”
“Now isn’t that just like a woman?” John looked at Lucy teasingly.
“It’s the morning train,” Jim informed them. “There’s no through evening train on the C. and W. at seven ten and there is in the morning.”
“By George, you must be taking Professor Forgetproof’s correspondence course for strengthening the memory, Jim. You certainly do carry around a bunch of useless facts in your head.”
“This one wasn’t,” said Lucy smiling.
“I thought it wasn’t till night.” John sighed and lighted a cigarette.
“He wanted all day to talk Howland into a Byzantine decoration scheme for his interior,” Jim explained to Lucy, getting out his pipe meanwhile.
“That’s right,” admitted John, blowing smoke rings and poking his finger through them.
There was a moment’s silence. Jim’s pipe seemed to be out of order.
“I want to get down,” announced Dimmie, and a slight tension was broken.
“Let mother untie your bib first, dear. Where are you going, baby?”
“I’m goin’ to sit in Uncle Jim’s lap.”
“Why Uncle Jim hasn’t had his coffee yet, son.”
“Come on, kid,” invited Jim, moving his chair sidewise to the table. “I can attend to coffee and you too.”
“There’s no use getting self conscious about this matter of your mother, Lucy.” John returned to the unwelcome subject. “We’ve no desire to keep anything from Jim.”
“Of course not,” Lucy agreed quickly.
“This is our last evening alone, Jim.” John ran his fingers through his hair. “It’s all right for Lucy’s mother to forgive me, I suppose, but as my chief crime seems to have been marrying her daughter, I’m not so grateful as she probably imagines.”
“She felt unkindly toward me long before I ever met you, John,” Lucy said seriously, looking at Dimmie.
“But more since,” John insisted.
“To be sufficient for yourselves is the greatest crime toward other people,” remarked Jim, straightening Dimmie’s collar. “Believe it’s begun to rain again,” he added, glancing toward the window.
“You’ll be surprised when you see mother,” averred Lucy irrelevantly.
Jim laughed.
“I shouldn’t feel much anxiety about anybody kin to Lucy.”
“Joking aside,” interrupted John, “to be blamed as I was has been a pretty painful experience.”
Lucy smiled at him.
“I don’t think anybody was to blame,” she decided.
“You never do, Lucy,” returned Jim.
“That’s a fact,” John complained. “Now I think there are times when it’s up to a man’s self-respect to blame the other fellow a little.”
Jim puffed at his pipe, staring at the ceiling.
“Well, John, if Lucy can overlook things you ought to be able to. She’s the one who has been up against it. You shouldn’t kick.”
“Yes, he should, Jim,” put in Lucy hastily. “Anybody but John would feel resentment still.”
John lighted another cigarette.
“Oh, that’s nothing, Lucy. I couldn’t very well feel hard toward anyone who seems as cut up as your mother in—in her present situation.”
“Plenty of people could,” insisted Lucy.
“I guess she resented your father’s having been here,” said John, laughing uncomfortably.
“Well, Papa has done so much for me that nothing can make me turn against him,” declared Lucy.
John rumpled his hair again.
“Hang it all, you can’t blame me for not being crazy to have a stranger in the house indefinitely, no matter how nice she might prove to be!”
“Especially one who neglected to seek your acquaintance until she was in trouble,” put in Lucy with an unaccustomed approach to bitterness.
Jim knocked the ashes from his pipe.
“I don’t blame you for feeling a little sore toward your mother, Lucy,” he remarked.
“I try not to,” said Lucy impatiently, “but—”
Jim smiled.
“If it had been anyone else but John, eh?”
“If it had been anyone else but John,” she repeated; “exactly.”
“He’s an honor to the family,” Jim declared, reaching over and pulling John’s rebellious hair.
“He is.” Lucy was emphatic.
John arose and went around the table to Lucy.
“You’re a good kid, Lucy,” he said, leaning down and kissing her forehead.
She stood up and smoothed his rumpled hair.
“Where’s Dimmie gone to?” she asked.
“Here I am, Mamma,” Dimmie called from the floor on the opposite side of the table.
“Come and help Mother clear off the table, Sonny.”
“I’ll help too,” offered Jim.
“You can wipe the dishes,” she conceded.
II
It was eight o’clock in the morning.
In the dining room of
