CHAPTER XXVII
THE JUDGE IS IMPRESSED
It was late September; the yellow maples threw gold on sky and ground; oaks and hickories were mantled in ruddy purples. Along the banks of the river the solemn procession of outgoing summer was begun; on dry nights mountain fires spread crackling smoky fringes. The Westchester hills, the hills of Pocantico, were trailed in grape-colored mists; bloom was on the Ramapos; amethystine smokes along the Highlands and the Palisades.
There was drowse and arrest in the air, a kind of heat that was different from summer, more dazing, more intensely keyed, with greater power to make one restless. Sard, lying on her couch in the tower-room, felt as if a world was closing in on her, as if the sky pressed and the hills leaned to smother. She had been reading to Dunstan, for the first time sitting up in his wheeled chair, had seen him drift off to sleep, and had then put down her book with an unconquerable sense of listlessness, of lack of purpose that had somehow closed in on her.
The girl, her body and mind built for action, for creative and progressive things, found herself victimized by a slowly narrowing circle of life, static, unimaginative, unprogressive; she was the fiery center of a wooden wheel of existence that revolved in accustomed sameness with no effort, to no purpose.
"When Dunstan gets well," thought Sard desperately, "when Dunstan doesn't need me, what shall I do then? Aunt Aurelia doesn't really need me, Father will have nothing to do with me unless I—just—just capitulate. And I can't do that. What shall I do?"
The girl's mind, shrinking from her father's idea of her, went over the situation; the only way to clear up that situation was to say she had been mistaken in Colter, that she proudly told herself she could never do. But supposing Colter never came back, never—came—back to Willow Roads? Life would go on the same and, of course, one could adapt one's self to anything; with a shiver the girl tried to think what this adaptation would mean.
As far as those of her own group were concerned, there was no life. All mingling with the Bunch was over. Life, then, would mean social cliques and women's clubs, more or less boss controlled, politically influenced, "run" by one or two personalities, powerful in prestige but prejudiced and limited as to opportunity or progress. In such gatherings the girl instinctively felt there could be nothing constructive for her; the chemistry of these organizations was controlled by the acids of personal dislike or preference, or jealousy. Little careful nothings of possessions or dress were the intellectual meat of these associations, the inhibitions of the mentally torpid or the censorious attitude of the unimaginative virtuous. None of these things attracted a girl of Sard's impulse, a soul that demanded fine contacts, the eager mingling of men and women in associations of tolerance and forward looking, the stimulus of persons of vivid experience. Sard mentally said "No" to it all.
Yet it was characteristic of her inherent nobility that she should attempt to force herself to an interest in these home matters, to attempt to form herself humbly on that narrow model. "It isn't nice to be choosy and exclusive," thought the girl; "real people are never that. I mustn't be 'superior,' whatever I do." She bent puzzled brows. "What would Colter have thought to be the right thing, to stay here and grow smaller and more timid and with less fresh impulse, or to break away, earn my own living, and, from Father's point of view, forfeit my right to my home?" "Ah! what would Colter think?" That was the sentence that dominated all Sard's life now.
From under her pillow the girl drew a letter from Watts Shipman—eagerly her eye sought one passage—one she had read and reread: