Paul looked at her quickly, laughing a little, sheepishly. He waited a moment, during which time Mark announced that he was going out to the sand-pile, and then said, in a pleasant tone, "What can I do?"
His mother nodded at him with a smile, refrained from the spoken word of approbation which she knew he would hate, and took thought as to what he might do that would afflict him least. "You can go and sweep off the front porch, and straighten out the cushions and chairs, and water the porch-box geraniums."
He disappeared, whistling loudly, "Massa's in the cold, cold ground." Marise hoped automatically that Elly was not in earshot to hear this.
She felt herself tired to the point of exhaustion by the necessity always to be divining somebody's inner processes, putting herself in somebody's else skin and doing the thing that would reach him in the right way. She would like, an instant, just an instant, to be in her own skin, she thought, penetrated with a sense of the unstable equilibrium of personal relations. To keep the peace in a household of young and old highly differentiated personalities was a feat of the Blondin variety; the least inattention, the least failure in judgment, and opportunities were lost forever. Her sense of the impermanence of the harmony between them all had grown upon her of late, like an obsession. It seemed to her that her face must wear the strained, propitiatory smile she had so despised in her youth on the faces of older woman, mothers of families. Now she knew from what it came . . . balancing perpetually on a tight-rope from which . . .
Oh, her very soul felt crumpled with all this pressure from the outside, never-ending!
The worst was not the always recurring physical demands, the dressing and undressing the children, preparing their food and keeping them clean. The crushing part was the moral strain; to carry their lives always with you, incalculably different from each other and from your own. And not only their present lives, but the insoluble question of how their present lives were affecting their future. Never for a moment from the time they are born, to be free from the thought, "Where are they? What are they doing? Is that the best thing for them?" till every individual thought of your own was shattered, till your intelligence was atrophied, till your sensibilities to finer things were dulled and blunted.
Paul came back. "About ready for Henry?" he asked. "I've finished the porch."
She put the two tightly closed kettles inside the fireless cooker and shut down the lid. "Yes, ready for Henry," she said.
She washed her hot, moist face in cold water, drank a glass, put on a broad-brimmed garden hat, and set out for the field back of the barn. The kitchen had been hot, but it seemed cool compared to the heat into which they stepped from the door. It startled Marise so that she drew back for an instant. It seemed to her like walking through molten metal. "Mercy! what heat!" she murmured.
"Yes, ain't it great?" said Paul, looking off, down the field, "just what the corn needs."