FullReads

And yet he knew this was a mood, and that in a few hours the love and the habit of life would come back upon him and upon them; that he would go back to the city in a few days; that these people would live on and make the best of it.

"I’ll make the best of it," he said at last, and his thought came back to his mother and Grant.

IV

The next day was a rainy day; not a shower, but a steady rain–an unusual thing in midsummer in the West. A cold, dismal day in the fireless, colorless farmhouses. It came to Howard in that peculiar reaction which surely comes during a visit of this character, when thought is a weariness, when the visitor longs for his own familiar walls and pictures and books, and longs to meet his friends, feeling at the same time the tragedy of life which makes friends nearer and more congenial than blood relations.

Howard ate his breakfast alone, save Baby and Laura, its mother, going about the room. Baby and mother alike insisted on feeding him to death. Already dyspeptic pangs were setting in.

"Now ain’t there something more I can–"

"Good heavens! No!" he cried in dismay. "I’m likely to die of dyspepsia now. This honey and milk, and these delicious hot biscuits–"

"I’m afraid it ain’t much like the breakfasts you have in the city. "

"Well, no, it ain’t," he confessed. "But this is the kind a man needs when he lives in the open air. "

She sat down opposite him, with her elbows on the table, her chin in her palm, her eyes full of shadows.

"I’d like to go to a city once. I never saw a town bigger’n Lumberville. I’ve never seen a play, but I’ve read of ’em in the magazines. It must be wonderful; they say they have wharves and real ships coming up to the wharf, and people getting off and on. How do they do it?"

"Oh, that’s too long a story to tell. It’s a lot of machinery and paint and canvas. If I told you how it was done, you wouldn’t enjoy it so well when you come on and see it. "

"Do you ever expect to see me in New York?"

"Why, yes. Why not? I expect Grant to come On and br
ing you all some day, especially Tonikins here. Tonikins, you hear, sir? I expect you to come on you’ for birfday, sure. " He tried thus to stop the woman’s gloomy confidence.

‘I hate farm life," she went on with a bitter inflection. "It’s nothing but fret, fret and work the whole time, never going any place, never seeing anybody but a lot of neighbors just as big fools as you are. I spend my time fighting flies and washing dishes and churning. I’m sick of it all. "

Howard was silent. What could he say to such an indictment? The ceiling swarmed with flies which the cold rain had driven to seek the warmth of the kitchen. The gray rain was falling with a dreary sound outside, and down the kitchen stovepipe an occasional drop fell on the stove with a hissing, angry sound.

The young wife went on with a deeper note:

"I lived in Lumberville two years, going to school, and I know a little something of what city life is. If I was a man, I bet I wouldn’t wear my life out on a farm, as Grant does. I’d get away and I’d do something. I wouldn’t care what, but I’d get away. "

There was a certain volcanic energy back of all the woman said that made Howard feel she’d make the attempt. She didn’t know that the struggle for a. place to stand on this planet was eating the heart and soul out of men and women in the city, just as in the country. But he could say nothing. If be had said in conventional phrase, sitting there in his soft clothing, "We must make the best of it all," the woman could justly have thrown the dishcloth in his face. He could say nothing.