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“Well, yes, perhaps. The Golheims made a tour last summer and— they make me sick!—they never stop talking about it. ”

They went. And Mabelle enjoyed it. She was by no means always a nagger and an improver; she was so only when her interests or what she deemed the interests of her children were threatened. She made jokes about the towns through which they passed—any community of less than fifty thousand was to her New Yorkism a “hick hole”—and she even sang jazz and admired his driving, which was bad.

They had headed north, up the Hudson. At Glens Falls he took the highway to the right, instead of left toward the Great Lakes, and she, the city girl, the urban rustic, to whom the only directions that meant anything were East Side and West Side as applied to New York, did not notice, and she was still unsuspicious when he grumbled. “Looks to me like I’d taken the wrong road. ” Stopping at a filling station, he demanded, “How far is it to Lake George? We ought to be there now. ”

“Well, stranger, way you’re headed, it’ll be about twenty-five thousand miles. You’re going plumb in the wrong direction. ”

“I’ll be darned! Where are we? Didn’t notice the name of the last town we went through. ”

“You’re about a mile from Fair Haven. ”

“Vermont?”

“Yep. ”

“Well, I’ll be darned! Just think of that! Can’t even be trusted to stay in one state and not skid across the border line!”

Mabelle was looking suspicious, and he said with desperate gayety, “Say, do you know what, May? We’re only forty miles from our farm! Let’s go have a look at it. ” Mabelle made a sound of protest, but he turned to the children, in the back seat amid a mess of suitcases and tools and a jack and spare inner tubes, and gloated, “Wouldn’t you kids like to see the farm where I worked as a kid— where your grandfather and great-grandfather were born? And see your Granduncle Rob? And see all the little chicks, and so on?”

“Oh, yes!” they shrilled together.

With that enthusiasm from her beloved young, with the smart and uniformed young filling-station attendant listening, Mabelle’s talent for being righteous and indignant was gagged. Appearances! She said lightly to the filling-station man, “The doctor just doesn’t seem to be able to keep the road at all, does he? Well, Doctor, shall we get started?”

Even when they had gone on and were alone and ready for a little sound domestic quarreling, she merely croaked, “Just the same, it seems mighty queer to me!” And after another mile of brooding, while Sidney drove silently and prayed: “Awfully queer!”

But he scarcely heard her. He was speculating, without in the least putting it into words, “I wonder if in the early summer evenings the fireflies still dart above the meadows? I wonder if the full moon, before it rises behind the hemlocks and sugar maples along the Ridge, still casts up a prophetic glory? I wonder if sleepy dogs still bark across the valley? I wonder if the night breeze slips through the mowing? I, who have for fortress and self-respect only a stuffy office room—I wonder if there are still valleys and stars and the quiet night? Or was that all only the dream of youth?”

They slept at Rutland, Sidney all impatient of the citified hotel bedroom. It was at ten in the morning—he drove in twenty minutes the distance which thirty years ago had taken Uncle Rob an hour and a half—that he drove up to the white house where, since 1800, the Dows had been born.