The Road to Understanding

by Eleanor H. Porter

The summer passed and October came. Life at the Dale Street flat had settled into a monotony of discontent and dreariness. Helen, discouraged, disappointed, and far from well, dragged through the housework day by day, wishing each night that it were morning, and each morning that it were night—a state of mind scarcely conducive to happiness on her part.

For all that Burke was away so many evenings now, Helen was not so lonely as she had been in the spring; for in Mrs. Jones's place had come a new neighbor, Mrs. Cobb. And Mrs. Cobb was even brighter and more original than Mrs. Jones ever was, and Helen liked her very much. She was a mine of information as to housekeeping secrets, and she was teaching Helen how to make the soft and dainty little garments that would be needed in November. But she talked even more loudly than Mrs. Jones had talked; and her laugh was nearly always the first sound that Burke heard across the hall every morning. Moreover, she possessed a phonograph which, according to Helen, played "perfectly grand tunes"; and some one of these tunes was usually the first thing that Burke heard every night when he came home. So he called her coarse and noisy, and declared she was even worse than Mrs. Jones; whereat Helen retorted that of course he wouldn't like her, if she did—which (while possibly true) did not make him like either her or Mrs. Cobb any better.

The baby came in November. It was a little girl. Helen wanted to call her "Vivian Mabelle." She said she thought that was a swell name, and that it was the name of her favorite heroine in a perfectly grand book. But Burke objected strenuously. He declared very emphatically that no daughter of his should have to go through life tagged like a vaudeville fly-by-night.

Of course Helen cried, and of course Burke felt ashamed of himself. Helen's tears had always been a potent weapon—though, from over-use, they were fast losing a measure of their power. The first time he saw her cry, the foundations of the earth sank beneath him, and he dropped into a fathomless abyss from which he thought he would never rise. It was the same the next time, and the next. The fourth time, as he felt the now familiar sensation of sinking down, down, down, he outflung desperate hands and found an unexpected support—his temper. After that it was always with him. It helped to tinge with righteous indignation his despair, and it kept him from utterly melting into weak subserviency. Still, even yet, he was not used to them—his wife's tears. Sometimes he fled from them; sometimes he endured them in dumb despair behind set teeth; sometimes he raved and ranted in a way he was always ashamed of afterwards. But still they had the power, in a measure, to make his heart like water within him.

So now, about the baby's name, he called himself a brute and a beast to bring tears to the eyes of the little mother—toward whom, since the baby's advent, he felt a remorseful tenderness. But he still maintained that he could have no man, or woman, call his daughter "Vivian Mabelle."

"But I should think you'd let me name my own baby," wailed his wife.

Burke choked back a hasty word and assumed his pet "I'll-be-patient-if-it-kills-me" air.

"And you shall name it," he soothed her. "Listen! Here are pencil and paper. Now, write down a whole lot of names that you'd like, and I'll promise to select one of them. Then you'll be naming the baby all right. See?"

Helen did not "see," quite, that she would be naming the baby; but, knowing from past experience of her husband's temper that resistance would be unpleasant, she obediently took the paper and spent some time writing down a list of names.

Burke frowned a good deal when he saw the list, and declared that it was pretty poor pickings, and that he ought to have known better than to have bound himself to a silly-fool promise like that. But he chose a name (he said he would keep his word, of course), and he selected "Dorothy Elizabeth" as being less impossible than its accompanying "Veras," "Violets," and "Clarissa Muriels."