SIMEON
A crisis does not create character, but is simply its test. The young man who entered the gates of No. 64 Jefferson Street at five that afternoon was in all respects he who left them at a quarter before four, though he seemed very different to himself. He went direct to his own room and did not descend until the supper bell sounded—that funny little old jangling bell he and Del had striven to have abolished in the interests of fashionable progress, until they learned that in many of the best English houses it is a custom as sacredly part of the ghostly British Constitution as the bathless bath of the basin, as the jokeless joke of the pun, as the entertainment that entertains not, as the ruler that rules not and the freedom that frees not. When he appeared in the dining-room door, his mother and Del were already seated. His mother, her white face a shade whiter, said: "I expect you'd better sit—there." She neither pointed nor looked, but they understood that she meant Hiram's place. It was her formal announcement of her forgiveness and of her recognition of the new head of the family. With that in his face that gave Adelaide a sense of the ending of a tension within her, he seated himself where his father had always sat.
It was a silent supper, each one absorbed in thoughts which could not have been uttered, no one able to find any subject that would not make overwhelming the awful sense of the one that was not there and never again would be. Mrs. Ranger spoke once. "How did you find Janet?" she said to Arthur.
His face grew red, with gray underneath. After a pause he answered:
"Very well." Another pause, then: "Our engagement is broken off."
Mrs. Ranger winced and shrank. She knew how her question and the effort of that answer must have hurt the boy; but she did not make matters worse with words. Indeed, she would have been unable to say anything, for sympathy would have been hypocritical, and hypocrisy was with her impossible. She thought Arthur loved Janet; she realized, too, the savage wound to his pride in losing her just at this time. But she had never liked her, and now felt justified in that secret and, so she had often reproached herself, unreasonable dislike; and she proceeded to hate her, the first time she had ever hated anybody—to hate her as a mother can hate one who has made her child suffer.
After supper, Mrs. Ranger plunged into the household duties that were saving her from insanity. Adelaide and Arthur went to the side veranda. When Arthur had lighted a cigarette, he looked at it with a grim smile—it was astonishing how much stronger and manlier his face was, all in a few hours. "I'm on my last thousand of these," said he. "After them, no more cigarettes."
"Oh, it isn't so bad as all that!" said Adelaide. "We're still comfortable, and long before you could feel any change, you'll be making plenty of money."
"I'm going to work—next Monday—at the mills."
Adelaide caught her breath, beamed on him. "I knew you would!" she exclaimed. "I knew you were brave."
"Brave!" He laughed disagreeably. "Like the fellow that faces the fight because a bayonet's pricking his back. I can't go away somewhere and get a job, for there's nothing I can do. I've got to stay right here. I've got to stare this town out of countenance. I've got to get it used to the idea of me as a common workingman with overalls and a dinner pail."