Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/736

684 like a caress. John looked worn. He seemed actually to have borne half of everything for her. With that ineffable smile of hers, she closed her eyes again on security and content. To think she had ever weighed the piano and the Ladies Literary Society against this!

Edith, three years younger, was accepted as her share of work. She reflected gratefully that the very absence of fine frenzy was what made this sweet rationality possible.

Life had given her what she lacked judgment to keep for herself,—an individual interest. For, through John's office and her nursery years, his even success never sought her participation, and he left the children to her, sure that she knew more of measles, manners, and spelling; and very much impressed by her ideas of "control," "discipline," "development," "elimination,"—especially with such model youngsters to show for it! Around them her ambitions and idealizations settled. She could afford now to have her husband merely one of the essential, taken-for-granted good things of life, like food and light.

The summer Ward passed—barely—for the high school, his father took him down to the warehouse for the holidays. Time the boy began some practical training, he said; and Marcia agreed. The boy himself liked better to do things with hands than head. The novelty and importance of business caught him. He was at an age when school seems simply a prison from life. As September came closer, notch by notch, he had so much to say about it that one day his father took him up with, "Well, what do you say to staying with me, then?"

It was so summary, so unprecedented, for John to take a hand with the children!

"I never dreamed of your considering it," Marcia said to him, alone. "I thought we agreed that a foundation education at least was essential."

"Oh, he has that. He has as much as I ever got."

"I always hoped," she said, skilfully, "that we could give the children more than either of us had."

"That's the idea exactly. I'd like to give the boy a start. Mine was such a grind. And since he likes business—"

"Isn't he young to know what he likes? There's no need for him to decide yet."

"Except that he can't begin too young what he means to do. People waste too much time these days getting ready; the best preparation for doing a thing is to begin doing it. And if he's his father's son—"

"Mayn't he be a little his mother's? Sometimes I think Edith is more your child and Ward mine, and that his knack at drawing—"

"Oh, they all go through that, don't they? Like whooping-cough and writing valentines. Ward never got much out of books. I don't believe he'd get hold of Greek and logarithms."

"A manual course, then," she pleaded, with the desperation that sees defeat. "We mustn't let him stop altogether! In any case four years more will give us all time to judge better, and won't do him any harm."

"Neither will the business training. Now, Little Mother, leave the boy to me. It's time I did my share by him. Isn't it possible the father may know best about the son?" How could he know better than the mother? Marcia had long ago learned that when John had an opinion it was likely to be worth while. But he was wrong now—wrong. "Have your way with the girl. Give her all the schooling you want. It means a lot to women—they have time for it, and they ought to have everything possible to make up. Besides, I believe in girls having something to fall back on in emergency. And I'm not afraid of its spoiling her mother's daughter. So you take the girl, and I the boy. Now, is that a bargain?"

It seemed hardly a fair bargain, since, after all, both were to be as he approved. But the deeper fallacy she herself did not see fully then. Heretofore their dissimilarities had carried them at best in parallel, at worst in opposite, directions. Now suddenly, for the first time, they found themselves moving squarely against each other. And since it was simply one no against one equally legitimate aye, she thought it fair to leave the deciding vote to the boy.

Before him she tried to put all sides of the matter, while he listened, perforce, but restlessly half attentive. "Don't you see the point, son?"