Page:The Professor's House - Willa Cather.pdf/128

 zeal, he had been fooled more than once. He knew that the wonderful seldom holds water, that brilliancy has no staying power, and the unusual becomes commonplace by a natural law.

In those first months Mrs. St. Peter saw more of their protégé than her husband did. She found him a good boarding-place, took care that he had proper summer clothes and that he no longer addressed her as “Ma’am.” He came often to the house that summer, to play with the little girls. He would spend hours with them in the garden, making Hopi villages with sand and pebbles, drawing maps of the Painted Desert and the Rio Grande country in the gravel, telling them stories, when there was no one by to listen, about the adventures he had had with his friend Roddy.

“Mother,” Kathleen broke out one evening at dinner, “what do you think! Tom hasn’t any birthday.”

“How is that?”

“When his mother died in the mover wagon, and Tom was a baby, she forgot to tell the O’Briens when his birthday was. She even forgot to tell them how old he was. They thought he must be a year and a half, because he was so big, but Mrs. O’Brien always said he didn’t have enough teeth for that.”

St. Peter asked her whether Tom had ever said how it happened that his mother died in a wagon.