“Oh, I imagine that really would be about like our Daniel’s idea, when I was a little fellow,” said Robert. “When we first came out West, and when we had plenty of grain and three or four cows, and a well-built, sunny house, and the big windows full of plants, and an outfit of kinder-garden ‘gifts’ and Daniel’s perfect knowledge of the philosophically-religious-science of child-gardening; and when I had agreed to buy all the clothes for as many children as happened to come to the door, and when we were hindered, because the mother there,” he said, halting with a quizzical glance at Althea, “would not have all sorts of nondescript children homing themselves in our house. Your thought, Mrs. Mancredo, is about like Daniel’s and mine then was.
“But, Mrs. Mancredo, my mother was queen of that home, and was a splendid homemaker, with Daniel’s help; only in our case she was the money-maker, and Daniel was the family philosopher. Yet she would no more tolerate the thought than as if there were some moral taint, in being simply good to folks. And as Daniel was taking the part of mother-man and Althea of the man-mother, Daniel succumbed. Now seeing we are all telling the truth, JUST AS IF THE LIGHT THAT LIGHTETH EVERY MAN WAS SHINING RIGHT THROUGH US, REVEALING ALL THAT IN EACH OF US HINDERS THE GROWTH OF ‘THE LILIES’ OF THIS RESURRECTION TIME,—let’s have the man-mother tell us, if she can, why she did not let other children share Ethel’s ideal surroundings and true academical-advantages, which that man-of-men, Daniel, was so lavishly bestowing on one little solitary girl. Will you tell us, lady?” said Robert.
The giant was timid and fragmentary in his statements, like one whose brain was crowded full of self-adjusting ideals. His headaches made him distrustful of himself in these days. But better times were coming.
Althea, the man-mother, the business head of the family (for that she had been), looked perturbed. She wished Robert had not brought up that question, either publicly or privately. She looked at him in a way that meant: “Robert, tell them it’s no matter about it.” But he did not tell them so; he wanted to know. They were all hunting for truth, and women were wanting men to tell the truth squarely to them, so that men could start and eventually “square the circle.” By inference, women are to now explicitly unveil the remote recesses of their mental-hidingplaces; and that was what the judicial-looking Robert now said blankly to Althea.
Althea, quite amazed, raised her eyes, so like Robert’s, with a half-challenging shake of the head. But he looked stringent and unmoved.
She rose a little uneasily on her chair, quaintly folding her handsome hands, like a child who “did not know the answer.” No one smiled. All gazed at her unflinchingly, every eye magisterially beholding her.
For all the years of the children’s lives she had taken them to task like this, saying: “Of course you know why you do each act; or, of course you would refrain from action till you found out.”
She had never been taken to task before, and had rushed through too many strokes of big business to submit to much interference.
It was not that she was unwilling to explain the facts of this affair; it was that she did not “understand such a little thing.” So she said: “I do not know.”
“Oh, oh, Robert, would you ever dare to ‘NOT KNOW’?” said Ethel, folding her hands in imitation of Althea.