"He has been so nervous and unlike himself ever since the failure of his play, mother," she said. "It's hard to understand, but it meant more to him than a woman can realize."
"I suppose so," returned Mrs. Pendleton sympathetically. "Your father says that he spoke to him bitterly the other day about being a failure. Of course, he isn't one in the least, darling," she added reassuringly.
"I sometimes think that Oliver's ambition was the greatest thing in his life," said Virginia musingly. "It meant to him, I believe, a great deal of what the children mean to me. He felt that it was himself, and yet in a way closer than himself. Until that dreadful time in New York I never understood what his work may mean to a man."
"I wish you could have gone with him, Jinny."
"I couldn't," replied Virginia, as she had replied so often before. "I know Harry doesn't look sick," she went on with that soft obstinacy which never attacked and yet never yielded a point, "but something tells me that he isn't well."
An hour later, when she put him to bed, he looked so gay and rosy that she almost allowed herself the weakness of a regret. Suppose nothing was wrong, after all? Suppose, as Oliver had said, she was merely "sensational"? While she undressed in the dark for fear of awaking Jenny, who was sleeping soundly in her crib on Virginia's side of the bed, her mind went back over the two harrowing days through which she had just lived, and she asked herself, not if she had triumphed for good over Abby, but if she had really done what was right both for Oliver and the children. After all, the whole of life came back simply to doing the thing that was right. So unused was she to the kind of introspection which weighs emotions as if they were facts, that she thought slowly, from sheer lack of practice in the subtler processes of reasoning. Worry, the plain, ordinary sort of worry with which she was unhappily familiar, had not prepared her for the piercing anguish which follows the probing of the open wounds in one's soul. To lie sleepless over butchers' bills was different, somehow, from lying sleepless over the possible loss of Oliver's love. It was different, and yet, just as she had asked herself over and over again on those other nights if she had done right to run up so large an account at Mr. Dewlap's, so she questioned her conscience now in the hope of finding justification for Oliver. "Ought I to have gone on the hunt yesterday?" she asked kneeling, with sore and aching limbs, by the bedside. "Had I a right to risk my life when the children are so young that they need me every minute? It is true nothing happened. Providence watched over me; but, then, something might have happened, and I could have blamed only myself. I was jealous—for the first time in my life, I was jealous—and because I was jealous, I did wrong and neglected my duty. Yesterday I sacrificed the children to Oliver, and to-day I sacrificed Oliver to the children. I love Oliver as much, but I have made the children. They came only because I brought them into the world. I am responsible for them—I am responsible for them," she repeated passionately; and a moment later, she prayed softly: "O Lord, help me to want to do what is right."
Through the night, tired and sore as she was, she hardly closed her eyes, and she was lying wide awake, with her hand on the railing of Jenny's crib, and her gaze on the half-bared bough of the old mulberry tree in the street, when a cry, or less than a cry, a small, choking whimper, from the nursery, caused her to spring out of bed with a start and slip into her wrapper which lay across the edge of the quilt.
"I'm coming, darling," she called softly, and the answer came back in Harry's voice: "Mamma, I'm afraid!"
Without waiting to put on her slippers, for one of them had slid under the bed, she ran across the carpet and through the doorway into the adjoining room.
"What is it, my lamb? Does anything hurt you?" she asked anxiously.