Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/305

 at twenty-four than they had to the eight-year-old, having always looked as old as possible. Jennie, the hired girl, had aged more than the old folks, he noted, as she went with him up the steep stairs to the little slant-ceilinged room now incredibly low and tiny.

He sat down on his little-boy bed, a thousand forgotten memories standing thick about him. He saw his mother leading in the sleepy little Neale, and now he saw that she was young, young as Martha, so young herself … as young as Martha! He was the strong, purposeful, determined young man, sitting on the bed and looking at that long-past scene, and yet he was also the sleepy little boy, feeling on his lips his young mother's kiss. "Good-night, Neale." "Good-night, Mother."

"Oh, damn it!" he cried impatiently, dismayed to feel that with the memory of his mother, he was aware as though of a palpable presence in the room there, of women … of women as different from men, emotionally exacting, wanting something different from men, with some fine-spun impossible ideal of what could be had out of human nature, troubling, hampering the real business of life … and yet all the time an inevitable part of things! For an instant he felt brutally angry with them, with their superfine weakening notions, and had for the first time the exasperated feeling that they were an element in life which you could neither do anything with, nor do without. The ewig-weibliche,—good heavens! All it did was to snarl things up! Neale got up from the bed and went over to the wash-stand, amazed at himself, his fit of fury passed, unable to conceive what had started him off on such an explosion. What under the sun possessed him, veering around like a crazy weather-cock from one high-strung mood to another, more shifts of feeling in a day than he had ever used to know in a year! He would put it all out of his mind, all! He simply would not allow himself to think of it again, to think of all that, he would not!

He went hastily down the stairs and fell to talking business with Grandfather, talking to very good purpose, too. To-day their projects went far beyond the little tract of second-growth oak they had first thought of. Grandfather, wily old spider,