"There are some things, Artie, our education has been taking out of us," continued Del, "that I don't believe we're the better for losing. I've been thinking of those things a good deal lately, and I've come to the conclusion that there really is a rotten streak in what we've been getting there in the East—you at Harvard, I at Mrs. Spenser's Select School for Young Ladies. There are ways in which mother and father are better educated than we."
"It does irritate me," admitted Arthur, "to find myself caring so much about the looks of things."
"Especially," said Adelaide, "when the people whose opinion we are afraid of are so contemptibly selfish and snobbish."
"Still mother and father are narrow-minded," insisted her brother.
"Isn't everybody, about people who don't think as they do?"
"I've not the remotest objection to their having their own views," said
Arthur loftily, "so long as they don't try to enforce those views on me."
"But do they? Haven't we been let do about as we please?"
Arthur shrugged his shoulders. The discussion had led up to property again—to whether or not his father had the right to do as he pleased with his own. And upon that discussion he did not wish to reenter. He had not a doubt of the justice of his own views; but, somehow, to state them made him seem sordid and mercenary, even to himself. Being really concerned for his mother's health, as well as about "looks," he strongly urged the doctor to issue orders on the subject of a nurse. "If you demand it, mother'll yield," he said.
"But I shan't, young man," replied Schulze curtly and with a conclusive squeezing together of his homely features. "Your mother is right. She gives your father what money can't buy and skill can't replace, what has often raised the as-good-as-dead. Some day, maybe, you'll find out what that is. You think you know now, but you don't." And there the matter rested.
The large room adjoining Hiram and Ellen's bedroom was made over into a sitting room. The first morning on which he could be taken from his bed and partially dressed, Mrs. Ranger called in both the children to assist her. The three tried to conceal their feelings as they, not without physical difficulty, lifted that helpless form to the invalid's chair which Ellen wheeled close to the bedside. She herself wheeled him into the adjoining room, to the window, with strands of ivy waving in and out in the gentle breeze, with the sun bright and the birds singing, and all the world warm and vivid and gay. Hiram's cheeks were wet with tears; they saw some tremendous emotion surging up in him. He looked at Arthur, at Adelaide, back to Arthur. Evidently he was trying to say something—something which he felt must be said. His right arm trembled, made several convulsive twitches, finally succeeded in lifting his right hand the few inches to the arm of the chair.