“It’s very different,” Mrs. Wise said; “think how much older you are; a selfish boy grows into a selfish man. Clif, give up the little boat at once.”
Even in his anger, somewhere in his young complex nature there was something that told the boy he was not being properly treated. If he had been asked kindly to lend the toy, even if he had refused at first, he felt he would have been glad to do so afterwards, if once it were clearly established that the right of refusing or consenting lay entirely with him. But this disposal of his property roused a fury in his breast.
“Take it,” he said, and flung the toy he had worked at with eager pleasure so roughly on the ground at his brothers’ feet that it broke in two or three pieces—he [60] ]had only saved himself by a strong effort from flinging it at Alf’s round head.
“Clif!” cried his mother, something like despair in her voice—“Clif!”
But he had rushed away out of the room and house.
Mrs. Wise tucked the baby beneath her arm for a moment, and crossed to the bookcase with a sigh. She reached three books down from the top shelf—one a thin pamphlet, titled On the Training and Education of our Boys; the second, Human Buds, and our Responsibilities in the Grafting of Them; the third, Children, their Souls and Minds.
“Perhaps it is my fault,” she muttered. Then she went back to her rocking-chair and buried herself in the books so deeply that she was quite deaf to the fierce quarrel that took place between Alf and Richie, and even hardly heard her infant’s cries.
She was a small, slight woman with a sallow-coloured skin stretched tightly over her bones. Her eyes were dull blue, faded by the tear-washings of many a year; her hair was light and colourless, pinned away with absolute disregard for appearance. She wore the very gown she should have shunned—a drab cotton wrapper.
Put carefully away in her work-box there was a large miniature protected by glass and enclosed in a dainty case. It represented a very sweet-faced girl, with blue, happy eyes; red, slightly pouting lips; [61] ]rounded pink cheeks; and sunshiny hair all curls and waves. This was the same woman at eighteen, before she had run away from a luxurious home and married the handsome young medical student, to whose suit her parents would not listen.
She was never forgiven or even recognized again by her people. And the rain of life came down too heavily for the poor butterfly nature. For all these fourteen years Dr. Wise had never been anything but direly poor; strive as he would he could make no way against the heavy handicap his early, headstrong folly had given him. It was seven years before he dare spare the time and money to complete his course and take his degree, and the other seven had been spent in struggling for a foothold in the profession and trying to keep a shelter over the poor little wife and all the babies that had come.