"No, I didn't. Clara!" She made no answer. "Clara!"
"Well?"
"I'm wretched. I'm afraid of falling out of bed. Why should I feel like this? It makes other people sleepy."
She laughed aloud. "Oh, Jim, Jim, Jim!"
"For God's sake, don't make that noise. It's not canny in the night. What are you laughing at?"
"At you, my dear. Oh me!"
"Will you put your arm round me again? What a devil I've been to you. Don't desert me. I'll start again if you'll help me."
She drew him to her. "There, then. You're just a child, a little child."
As she lay with her lips against his hair, steadying her breath that he might not be disturbed, she felt that he was more her son than Alexander was. Only for a few years had Alexander looked to her for all his needs; he had soon grown strong and self-reliant, and changed from baby to friend almost before she was aware, but this poor Jim, with his head on her breast, might never have known another resting-place, and it was his confidence in her, the demand for the comfort she could give, that satisfied the mother in her, and discounted all his weaknesses. It was perhaps as well that the daughter for whom she had wished had not been given to her, for in that house there was not room for two women, let alone two women of Clara's make, and there would have been contests with no Solomon to give decision, while now, denied a daughter, Clara was both rich and supreme. She had been born to cradle men and children, to caress them and buffet them at her wise will, and with the instinct which makes mothers care most for their feebler children, she loved people in proportion to their need of her. There had never been any danger that Alexander would outstrip his father in her affections, and if Rutherford could have understood her quality, he would have realized that he need not be jealous of his son. But it was more than jealousy that influenced his dealings with Alexander, for the boy had been born in a black hour, and to the father's eyes the shadow lay on him so persistently that at last he seemed to have created it. Of the three, only Clara truly understood its genesis, for the circumstances had permanently affected Rutherford's vision, inclining it to obliqueness, and Alexander could remember no life before this one in the old white house.
When Clara had met James Rutherford she was living as companion—that refuge for the penniless woman of her generation—to three ladies who were all at different stages of elderliness and all exacting, but she had not been one of the typical companions of romance; she was not meek and forbearing and tearful, nor of that defiant nature which, in fiction, wins all hearts. She was her sensible and cheerful self; she was sorry for the old ladies, and she enjoyed being kind to them, for she had very strongly that quality of helpfulness which all women are expected to have, and are blamed for not possessing. The old ladies in all their experience had never before had for companion a nice-looking young woman who considered herself their friend, chose their clothes with as much attention as she gave to her own, and had a fund of interesting things to tell them, including the progress of her love affairs.