This reply seemed to relieve the doctor's mind. His face lighted up. "I understand! Don't worry a mite. You will be all right in a few minutes. It is only a temporary nerve disturbance."
This proved to be true, and as her lips resumed their placid sweetness my courage came back. In a few hours she was able to see quite clearly, or at least as clearly as was normal to her age. Nevertheless I accepted this attack as a distinct and sinister warning. It not only emphasized her dependence upon me, it made me very definitely aware of what would happen to our household if she were to become a helpless invalid. Her need of a larger bed-chamber, with a connecting bathroom was imperative.
"I know you will both suffer from the noise and confusion of the building," I said to my aunt, "but I am going to enlarge mother's room and put in water and plumbing. If she should be sick in that small bedroom it would be horrible."
Up to this time our homestead had remained simply a roomy farmhouse on the edge of a village. I now decided that it should have the conveniences of a suburban cottage, and to this end I made plans for a new dining-room, a new porch, and a bath-room.
Mother was appalled at the audacity of my designs. She wanted the larger chamber, of course, but my scheme for putting in running water appealed to her as something almost criminally extravagant. She was troubled, too, by the thought of the noise, the dirt, the change which were necessary accompaniments of the plan.
I did my best to reassure her. "It won't take long, mother, and as for the expense, you just let me walk the floor."
She said no more, realizing, no doubt, that I could not be turned aside from my purpose.
There were no bathrooms in West Salem in 1899—the plumber was still the tinner, and when the news of my ambitious designs got abroad it created almost as much comment as my brother's tennis court had roused some five years earlier. As a force making toward things high-fi-lutin, if not actually un-American, I was again discussed. Some said, "I can't understand how Hamlin makes all his money." Others remarked, "Easy come, easy go!" Something unaccountable lay in the scheme of my life. It was illogical, if not actually illegal.
"How can he go skittering about all over the world in this way?" asked William McEldowney, and Sam McKinley said to my mother, "I swear, I don't see how you and Dick ever raised such a boy. He's a 'sport,'—that's what he is, a freak." To all of which mother answered only with a silent laugh.
The carpenters came, together with a crew of stonemasons, and the old kitchen began to move southward, giving place for the foundations of the new dining-room. By the end of the week, the lawn was littered with material and tools, and the frame-work was enclosed.