He wondered, dreamily, what it would mean to a boy to have a father who cared as much as that.
“Of course, everything will be as happy here as wanting-to can make it,” he reasoned. “It would need to be. We’re generally so stupid with the people we love. But it ought to go farther than that. Perhaps out here, where we have no settlement houses as centres of things that should exist for everyone, there may be a mission for a few more real homes.”
“Bury herself in the country, when the world needs her so much,” the mayor had said. “So far as the need goes,” he soliloquized, “I needn’t have worried over bringing her here.”
CHAPTER XVII.
“A tribal mind came into existence. Man had entered upon the long and tortuous and difficult path toward a life for the common good, with all its sacrifice of personal impulse, which he is still treading to-day.”—H. G. Wells in The Outline of History.
They gipsyed about through the country a lot that summer. The task of getting the neglected farm into bearing shape was a man-size job, and often, after a day in the fields, Billy worked until the last light faded, clearing away odds and ends to hasten the speed of the builders next day, especially building in the stone fireplace with his own hands—that was a joy he had always promised himself. But there were other days when he quit work early, took a plunge in the river at the foot of the pasture, dressed in outing clothes and motored into town.
On these occasions, a cartoonist in search of a subject for his next attack on farmers in politics would not have looked a second time at the sunbrowned young man with his swinging stride and crisp hair-cut. He seemed to break every established tradition of his class, not even loitering before the bills of movie stars and jaded stock companies, but transacting his business with despatch, then driving down a shady street
in the boulevarded residential section. He always stopped very quietly before a deep, dark stone house, took the steps with a bound, and rang with the shyness of a lover making his first call. He could never quite get over this. And a girl always met him just as quietly, with eyes just as eager to tell him she had been waiting for him. In spite of all that the actresses in the social game believed of the fascination of uncertainty, it held him like a lode-star, this constant declaration. He would have been as fearful of losing it by failing an iota of what she believed of him, as he would fear to lose the trust of a child by striking it down. It was easy to understand, now, why the fabric of family life held so safely sometimes.
Toward evening they usually left the city to follow winding roads through orchards and meadow lands. They were rich with many charms, these excursions—the faint, elusive scent from raspberry bloom and uncut clover, stirring in the night air; the occasional sleepy tinkle of a cow-bell, a lamb bleating back to the flock, or a mother calling her children in for the night; here and there a lamplighted house close to the road, blinds undrawn, showing the little group within; an old man and woman sitting in a seat they had built for themselves outside their little gate that they might not miss anything of the world going by them—the simple, vital
dramas of life flashing past with every mile of film of the open country.