Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/132

Rh and cleverness to put her little hand to the machine and reverse the engines—for it’s nothing less that she’s done! Oh, I know there’ll be a reaction—the pendulum’s sure to swing back: but you’ll see it won’t swing as far. Of course I shall go in the end—but Truscomb may go too: Jove, if I could pull him down on me, like what’s—his-name and the pillars of the temple!”

He had risen and was measuring the little sitting-room with his long strides, his head ﬂung back and his eyes dark with the inward look his mother had not always cared to see there. But now her own glance seemed to have caught a ray from his, and the knitting ﬂowed from her hands like the thread of fate, as she sat silent, letting him exhale his hopes and his wonder, and murmuring only, when he dropped again to the chair at her side: “You won’t go, Johnny—you won’t go.

Mrs. Westmore lingered on for over two weeks, and during that time Amherst was able, in various directions, to develop her interest in the mill-workers. His own schemes involved a complete readjustment of the relation between the company and the hands: the suppression of the obsolete company “store” and tenements, which had so long sapped the thrift and ambition of the workers; the transformation of the Hopewood grounds into a park and athletic ﬁeld, and the [ 118 ]