Page:Fidelia, (IA fidelia00balm).pdf/306

 she tires so easily now. I try to make her leave more to me; but she simply won't, David. You know mother." And Deborah, for all her habit of self-restraint, had to cry a little. She was very glad to have David in the house again; for David was the only brother near her age. The other brothers, Paul and John, were much younger. They belonged with Esther and Ruth as "the children."

David felt no inclination to tears, but was aroused by an insurgent emotion almost like anger. It was not against Deborah, and certainly it was not against his mother; it was not against his father, directly, but was against the manner of thinking and living which David once had described to Alice as his father's "game of forever pleasing God."

This game had been going on as long as David could remember and chiefly at the cost of his mother. As he had told Alice, David had never known his father to strive for things to indulge his mother and she had never striven for them herself; she always had been his father's faithful partner in his game of pleasing God, during the progress of which she had borne six children, nursed them, bathed them, made their clothes, taught them their first lessons, meanwhile cooking, washing dishes—and clothes—scrubbing, making beds, being wife and mother and maid-of-all work and, also, leader of the church auxiliaries and charitable societies and in the Sunday school.

Invariably in the little white parsonage beside the spired wooden church, she was the first up in the morning; rarely indeed was any one later to bed than she. David thought of her as sleeping intermittently for she