Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/738

686 of it are sure, in themselves, to be cross-currents and complications.

Marcia's conviction grew with results. Ward shut up in himself. With most of his friends away, he took to staying home in the evenings alone in the den on which he spent all his money, with a good eye for color, line, style. His father's friendliness drew no response. When Marcia slipped up to him one night, he hurried some papers under cover, and stood passive as she drew his cheek to hers. He could not allow for the complications of her loyalties and diplomacies.

But she had a glimpse of the papers. "Some of those correspondence courses," she told John.

"Good. Perhaps he's got the point already. Let's see if he sticks to it, Little Mother, and then "

But Ward never again brought up the subject of college.

He did not even conceal a resentment against Edith plodding faithfully along at her Latin and violin. How any of it could be such drudgery to a child of hers, Marcia marvelled. The girl looked pale and listless, her mother saw. Except for the consequences of that other withdrawal from school she might have considered a rest for Edith. As it was, she tried tutors and tonics and saved her all the outside demands,—which might have refreshed and balanced.

All attempts to draw Ward's confidences, to offer partnership in his night work, met blank silence. His passion for scholarship on the correspondence plan itself seemed to die of defiance. He took to going out at night.

Children are one of life's paradoxes,—a tie, or less happily a bond, they are quite as often and may be simultaneously a dividing wedge. Between Marcia and John the estrangement of conscious disagreement grew, only emphasized by the constrained courtesy that avoided the subject.

Then Edith, barely seventeen, herself became a problem.

One June moonlight Marcia, stepping out on the porch, saw the dark of a coatsleeve against the white shoulders of Edith's dress. "Daughter?"

From lifelong assurance Edith knew where to hide her face. "I know, mamma! There must be something dreadful the matter with me,—I didn't mind."

Hastings met it gallantly. Of course he was out of school only a little over a year, and making just ten dollars a week; but he and Edith loved each other; they meant to be married some day.

And Marcia had never thought of him, except as a boy who carried the child's books home from school!

"It won't do to be harsh with it," she told John. "The martyr is assured the moment his opinion gets him into trouble; he can't turn back then for his own self-respect; he is beyond further consideration. But they are two as frank and high-minded young ones as ever were; if we keep them so the thing will run its course and die naturally."

"All right, Little Mother; you know best about such things."

Her grateful smile was instant; her hand crept under his. "But I'm sorry," she mused; "I hoped to save her until They must be kept from nonsense at least. I wonder if I told her " He understood. That she should remember and regret after all these years! The tenderness of his half-depreciatory admiration reached her; and sharing the problem drew them closer than for a long time.

So Marcia let them feel free, guiding chiefly by keeping close to both.

Their openness made Ward's reserve more cutting. At last Marcia got courage to speak to John. "Is there nothing we can do?"

The look on his face warmed her toward him. "Not long ago I suggested that he go on the road for the house." So he was worrying too! "It's a better paying job than his, and a liberal education for a young fellow. He declined, without reasons, in that dumb abused way he's taken to lately. So I told him he must be on his own responsibility from now on, and he said —"

"What?"

Thank you; I would appreciate that courtesy.

"A—h!"

"He looks uncannily like you sometimes, Marcia, though he hasn't your lower face at all. A sensitive, high-spirited youngster, without a balance-wheel."

"Yet. He's nebulous; he'll find a cen-