"Now that I hark back, the only men as I can remember that amounted to enough to make you willing to overlook their cussedness, was men as had a handicap in looks.
"There was Pierre Laval's brother Damon. He was born with twelve toes, twelve fingers—two extry thumbs they was—and four front teeth.
"He certainly was the most audacious ugly young-un I ever set eyes on. I wasn't much more than a girl, to be sure, when I saw him first, but I went into yelling hysterics, and took to my bed. Pierre was handsome—and, you know how he ended? Damon, he gritted his teeth—and in his case he could do that early—and made up his mind to make good for his deficiencies—if you can say that 'bout one as had more rather than less than Nature generally bestows. Land! the learning that child was capable of absorbing! Hillcrest School just sunk into him like he was a sponge. When he got all he could over there, he just walked off as natural as could be, without a cent to his name—and they do say, so I've heard, that down the state they set an awful store by his knowledge of stars and moons and such-like. And Mick Falstar, cousin to Pete—"
"Never mind, Isa." Joyce looked wan and nerveless. These tales only accentuated the agony she felt whenever she was forced to concentrate her thoughts upon actualities.
When she was left to herself, she was beginning to regain the power of ignoring facts and living among ideals. She was growing more and more able to see a little spiritual baby at her breast—a beautiful child. And with that vision growing clearer she felt her own spirit gaining strength for flights into a future where this little son of hers, borne aloft by her determined will and purpose, should hold his own among men. Surely, she thought, God would not cripple mind, body and soul. God would be content with testing her love by the twisted body. The mind and soul would be—glorious!
Day by day, the young mother, creeping back into the warm, summer life, watched for intelligence to awaken in the grim little face; the first flying signal of the overpowering intellect that was to make recompense for all that had been withheld.
The misshapen body was always swathed in disguising wrappings; even the claw-like, groping hands were held under blankets when curious eyes were near. Isa had won Joyce's everlasting gratitude by holding her tongue regarding the child's bodily deformity; and the Hillcrest doctor, who had been summoned when the fever grew, did not consider the circumstance important enough to weigh on his memory when once the payment for his services was, to his surprise, forthcoming.
But the sad, little old face with its fringe of straight black hair! That must be public property, and its piteous appeal had no power beyond the mother, to stay the cruel jest and jibe.
"Say, Jude," Peter Falstar had said in offering his maudlin congratulations, "what's that you got up to your place—a baby or a Chinese idol? That comes of having a handsome wife, what has notions beyond what women can digest."
Jude did not take this pleasantry as one might suppose he would. His own primitive aversion to the strange, deformed child made him weakly sensitive. He recoiled from Falstar's gibe with a sneaking shame he dared not defend by a physical outburst.