“The idea!” he exclaimed. “Now if we were too poor to feed and clothe it there’d be some excuse, but——” He made his pause as expressive as he could.
“It isn’t that. I—I’m so tired and—I ought to be glad—and—and I’m not,” she began.
“Well, I suppose with mother gone”—Mrs. Hunter had returned to her old home on a visit—“you have got a good deal to look after, but I’ve got to get to the field now. You’re always raking something up that looks wrong to you. If you’d stick to your work and not run around looking for trouble you’d be able to want it, maybe.”
The force of her husband’s suggestion struck the girl. Perhaps it was true that she had missed the very highest for herself in loving ease and comfort enough to seek them. To put discontent away from her and to keep her thoughts occupied she began the spring housecleaning. There was so much regular cooking and milk work that only one room could be attacked at a time, but she kept busy, and the plan worked admirably during the day. She was not sleeping well, however, and found that nights have a power all their own. When the lights went out, thought held the girl in its relentless grip. It was of no use to lengthen her working hours in the hope that sleep would come more promptly, for the more exhausted Elizabeth became the less able was she to sleep, and thought stared at her out of the darkness with eyes like living coals.
Wherever Elizabeth turned this monster confronted her, this monster whose tail was a question mark, whose body obscured everything on the horizon of the immediate future except its own repulsive presence, and threw her back upon the suffering present and the much to be deplored past. Was it right to permit a child to come when joy had gone out of relations between its parents? This question grew and ripened and spread, and whenever she summoned up enough will-power to weed it out for an hour it would spring up anew, refreshed and more tenacious than ever.
“Whether it’s right or not for John and me to have a child after we’ve quit loving each other, if I can only be glad it’s coming, or even be willing to have it, I won’t mind, now,” she told herself. But she was not glad, and she was not even willing. She dragged herself about, keeping busy day after day as her husband had advised; it was her only refuge, and one which could not avail very long, for already she was worn out. On the last day of the cleaning, Hugh Noland came to the door of her room and speaking from the outside said:
“I came in to see if I couldn’t help you a little in getting ready for those shellers, Mrs. Hunter.” Hugh had noticed her weary look of late, and, as all the men about the house did, tried to help whenever there was time to be spared from the fields or when extra work was required of her.
“Shellers?”
Elizabeth backed out of the closet she was cleaning, and came around to the door.
“Shellers? Are we going to have shellers?”