"Then the salary! Of course people are making money here, but seems to me property's up one day and down the next. Chris got out his map, and we looked up Paris. It's hundreds of years old, but my! France can't begin with the United States, though we're not half settled. And it's a great thing! They'll go to England, too, and he will see kings and queens and high dukes. Why, I think it's just grand. Only I hope he won't forget us all or get up to such a degree he will never want to come back."
"Oh, he can't do that! He can't forget us!" I cried with a rending pang at my heart.
"Well, not exactly that, but don't you see, Ruth, that his life is going to be altogether different from ours? Of course you can't understand how a mother feels. She is glad to have her sons prosper, improve, even if it does take them away from her. She gets old and dies, and they have their new lives to live, so it is all right. Betty Collins's son married a girl whose father owned miles and miles of live oak timber, and they've made a fortune somewhere in the Carolinas. She's a great lady and wears velvet gowns and some kind of lace that was forty dollars a yard—think of it! And how she'd look setting foot in this muddy old Chicago. It's good enough for us who live here right straight along, but for ladies!"
She threw back her head and laughed. She was not at all dismayed, rather elated.
Well, it was a fine opportunity. And then to be held in such high esteem!
"How are you getting along with your black woman? And your new rooms! Husband's talking of building, our house is old, and we're crowded, and no mistake. I do wish Dan would see some nice girl out there," nodding her head, "and marry her. Homer's counting on getting married when he's twenty-one, but I tell him to get his cage first. Birds are easily captured. Homer's nice and steady, and he's saving, too. He will make a first-class husband. I have my eye on a girl for Ben," and her smile brought a warm color to my cheek.
"I hear your father's taking great interest in all the goings on. They talked high in '37. Why, you'd think the earth would be so full of people there'd hardly be standing room, and there's all to the Mississippi River. Not but what the town wants clearing up bad, but we don't want another panic."
She had been knitting as she talked. I liked to hear the rattle of her needles, they kept such exact time.
"Would you mind reading your letter? You're doing nothing, I observe."
I went in the other room and laid out the page that had the most tenderness and longing in it.