Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/439

Rh frame affair, there was a little garden and two apple trees. He walked around the house and saw his daughter, Jane Webster, lying in a hammock hung between the trees. There was an old rocking chair under one of the trees near the hammock and he went and sat in it. His daughter was surprised at his coming upon her so, at the noon hour when he so seldom appeared. "Well, hello dad," she said listlessly, sitting up and dropping a book she had been reading on the grass at his feet. "Is there anything wrong?" she asked. He shook his head.

Picking up the book he began to read and her head dropped again to the cushion in the hammock. The book was a modern novel of the period. It concerned life in the old city of New Orleans. He read a few pages. It was no doubt the sort of thing that might take one out of oneself, take one away from the dulness of life. A young man was stealing along a street in the darkness and had a cloak wrapped about his shoulders. Overhead the moon shone. The magnolia trees were in blossom filling the air with perfume. The young man was very handsome. The scene of the novel was laid in the time before the Civil War and he owned a great many slaves.

John Webster closed the book. There was no need of reading. When he was still a young man he had sometimes read such books himself. They took one out of oneself, made the dulness of everyday existence seem less terrible.

That was an odd thought, that everyday existence need be dull. There was no doubt the last twenty years of his own life had been dull, but during that morning life had not been so. It seemed to him he had never before had such a morning.

It was a strange and terrible fact, but the truth was he had never thought much about his daughter, and here she was almost a woman. There was no doubt she already had the body of a woman. The functions of womanhood went on in her body. He sat, looking directly at her. A moment before he had been very weary, now the weariness was quite gone. "She might already have had a child," he thought. Her body was prepared for child-bearing, it had grown and developed to that estate. What an immature face she had. Her mouth was pretty but there was something, a kind of blankness. Her face was like a fair sheet of paper on which nothing had been written. Her eyes in wandering about met his eyes. It was odd. Something like fright came into them. She sat quickly up. "What's the matter with you, Dad?" she asked sharply. He smiled. "There