Lester quoted this as he wheeled himself to the open door where Mattie stood looking out at the children fussing maternally over the little peeping yellow balls. “Honest to goodness, Mattie, their tail and wing feathers do come in so fast you can see them grow.” He added, “I’m watching feathers grow, too. Stephen is fairly sprouting wings he’s so good! It’s because he can play out of doors again, I suppose, after the winter. We’ve had such lovely weather of late.”
“Yes, it must be because he can play out of doors again,” said Aunt Mattie.
As they turned back into the kitchen, where a batch of bread was ready to be put into the oven, she asked, “Lester, aren’t you better of your indigestion lately?”
“Sh!” he warned her whimsically, his finger at his lips. “Don’t mention it aloud. I haven’t had any in months. But I don’t want it spoken about. Leave sleeping dogs lie. The doctor always said it was nervous, you know. I don’t know much about the geography of my innards, but I’ve thought once or twice that maybe that awful shake-up my nervous system got might have sorted things over into the right pile, as far as digestion goes. It’s not, however,” he said with a sudden grim, black look at his paralyzed legs, “a cure for indigestion that I could recommend.”
The tears sprang into Mattie’s eyes as she turned her face away, “It’s pretty hard!”
“I don’t pretend it’s any picnic. But it’s of no consequence of course.” He was able to say this with a bare and utter sincerity.
“Look here, Lester!” she broke out. “Why couldn’t you—I don’t believe but what you could go and be a professor somewhere in a University or a High School. Professors don’t have to walk around. And you’ve always set such store by poetry and books and everything. There can’t be anybody who’s more....”
Lester broke in with a laugh at her absurdity. “Why, you dear old girl, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’d make a mess of what they want in a school just as much as at the store. What makes you think colleges want teachers who love literature? They want somebody who can make young people sit still and listen whether they feel like it or not. They want somebody who can ‘keep order’ in a class room and drill students on dates so they can pass examinations. I couldn’t do that! And I’d loathe forcing literature down the throats of boys and girls who didn’t want it as I’d loathe selling things to people who didn’t need them. I’d be just a dead loss at it the way I always am.”
Seeing that she did not follow this, he added concretely, “Besides I could no more get a job without all the right certificates than I could set up shop as a doctor. Nowadays colleges want you to be a Ph.D. And there isn’t a cross-roads High School that’d look at a man who had only had three years in a State University fifteen years ago and had been making a failure of keeping accounts in a department store ever since.”
Mattie recognized the irrefutable nature of all this. “Yes, I see,” she said sadly.