Page:Dust - E. Haldeman-Julius - 1921.djvu/105

A ROSE-BUD IN THE DUST 101 chattering femininity had caused it. Mrs. Wade worked faster.

The kiss was like the touch of silk against Martin's cheek. He felt inexplicably sad as he put the child down again among her playthings. There was, he realized with a shock, much that he was missing, things he was letting work supplant. He wished that boy of theirs could have lived. All might have been different. He had almost forgotten that disappointment, had never understood until this moment what a misfortune it had been, and here he was being gripped by a more poignant sense of loss than he had ever before felt, even when he had lost his mother.

Wonderful as little Rose was, she was not his own. But, he wondered suddenly, wasn't this aching sense of need perhaps something utterly different from unsatisfied paternal instinct? He turned his head toward the kitchen where his Rag-weed was working and asked himself if she were gone and some other woman were here — such as little Rose might be when she grew up, one to whom he went out spontaneously, would not his life be more complete and far more worth while? What a fool he was, to bother his head with such get-nowhere questions! He dis- missed them roughly, but new processes of thought had been opened, new emotions awakened.