Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/743

Rh time. She could only count on his blood and her past work; there was nothing to do now but be on hand. And now Europe!

After the proposition, Edith pulled herself slowly out of her first sea of tears, to an entirely new rebellion. "It's too much," she answered her mother's familiar arguments; "we've done our share. It's just that he's determined to have his own way, as with Ward. Well, even so, then, mamma, what right has he to feel so sure 's right?"

John stood in the doorway.

The girl caught her breath, swayed toward flight, faced him. "It's true, papa," she apologized.

"I'm sorry you feel so, daughter. It may be, of course. But I think not. I try not to have it so."

"Oh, papa! You know we'll do anything to please you,—wait, I mean, until I'm older. But why should we? You'll not be better satisfied. Hastings won't be different. We know he'll never be rich." It never occurred to her to consider their changing.

"If it can't stand delay " John began.

"Delay is bad enough, but separation!"

"That's a good test, too."

"I'm not sure that it's a fair one. It's those who don't adapt who die. But with us the point is simply that we will lose those years."

"With still several left, daughter."

"But none like them. Oh, papa, we can only be young while we are young. We want to be happy now. Why can't people ever have what they want when they want it?"

In the silence Ward's steps came down the stairs; the front door closed after him going out.

Marcia laid a hand on her husband's arm. "What about our bargain, John?"

She had declared against him! Dropping all argument, she had claimed her extreme prerogative! There was no answer; she had always played fair.

His eyes were distressed, but he squared his shoulders, and held out two hands. "All right, children, it shall be a Jersey cow!"

The months that followed were not happy for either John or Marcia. Their love and confidence in each other's motives was a live wire by which they could send messages across the gap of difference; but the gap was wide and deep. For John it was doubly hard,—to help genially to clinch a mistake, in the soreness of defeat, of Marcia's' judgment, and in the final bitterness of knowing she had a certain apparent justification.

Ward quite threw himself into the preparations, enclosing and embowering the porch, decorating the house. He seemed more contented, less antagonistic. It no longer took insistence to exclude them; they had accepted his separate life. And he drifted naturally into talking more about himself, even confessing to some cartoons in local papers, signed only with a gripped hand. Marcia smiled to catch John calling his friends' attention to them with his old half-shamefaced pride.

As to what the long run would have proved of Edith's marriage, neither of her parents was ever to be satisfied. For, after little more than a year of laughing experiences and joy at the crest, for the young people whose clarity and lightness of heart made even physical discomforts lyrical, Edith died when her baby was born.

"And I urged her at school when she had no spirit for it," Marcia moaned, crushed. "and kept her at her violin all afternoon, because it would have been recreation to me, and she was worn out with our opposition when she married. We've sacrificed both the children, John, to our theories and our ambitions, piling up mistakes because of that first mistake!"

The truth was out between them like a naked sword. But in the new community of blame was the beginning of a trail through the canyon.

"We used our best judgment, dear." John thought more to comfort her than to defend himself. "We did mean their good. Everybody is bound to make mistakes. There's no telling what would have come if we had done differently. It's all like your old problem about sending them to Sunday-school,—you were afraid that if you made them go, they'd dislike it, if you didn't, they might never go at all. The fact is,—our interference makes very little difference one way or another." And that was, perhaps, the most the years