During two years only of Ernest's Technology course were he and Ben together. When the latter was graduated he went West at once to begin his contest for the honors and the wealth which were to work that wonderful change in the affairs of his family. But Ernest had started well, and even without his friend's guidance he kept on in the path he had marked out. To give an account of the four years of his work would be to tell a rather monotonous story. This was not because he allowed his life to be a mere routine—far from this. While he worked energetically during the winter, he managed to find time for recreation. Society, so-called, did not interest him. But he had a group of friends, of fixed purpose like his own, who were still sufficiently boyish to enjoy life. With them he took long walks in search of geological specimens, inviting them home on winter evenings to share Miss Theodora's simple tea.
From some of these Western friends of Ernest's, with a point of view so unlike her own, Miss Theodora gained an entirely different outlook on life. Ernest had impressed on her the fact that the West was to be his home, at least, until he had made a lot of money. She began, therefore, to take an interest, not only in these Westerners, with their broad pronunciation, but in the Western country itself. She re-read "The Oregon Trail"; she read one or two other books of Western travel. She studied the topography of Colorado and Nevada in her old atlas, and she always noted in the newspapers chance scraps of information about that distant region.
Nahant knew Ernest no more in summer. His long vacation was always spent elsewhere in practical field work. He almost dropped out of the lives of those who had known him so well as a little boy. At the same time, he had enough social diversion. In the new set of which he now formed one there was always more or less going on. The sisters of some of his friends invited him to their dances. He seemed so heartily to enjoy his new popularity that Kate realized, with a certain pain, that he was drawing away from her; that he was departing far from that pleasant old West End life. There was an irony of fate in remembering that by using her influence in the direction of the new work which Ernest had undertaken, she had helped to send him farther away.
XVII.
When the die was finally cast, Miss Theodora wisely kept to herself her disappointment at Ernest's change of plan. Her life thus far had accustomed her to disappointments. What a pang she had felt, for example, some years after leaving it, when she heard that the old family house on the hill had become a boarding house! How disturbed she had been, walking up Beacon Street one day, to see workmen tearing down one of the most dignified of the old purple-windowed houses, once the home of intimate friends of hers, to make way for an uglier if more ornate structure! What an intrusion she felt the car tracks to be which run through Charles Street across Beacon Street, connecting the South and the West Ends of the city! Miss Theodora's Boston was not so large but that it could be traversed by any healthy person on foot; and she agreed with Miss Chatterwits when she exclaimed, "What in the world has the West End to do with Roxbury Neck?"
Real trials, like Ernest's change of plan, Miss Theodora was able to bear with surprising equanimity. She had not even quailed when she made that discovery, hardest of all even for a sensible woman, that she was growing old. The first rude shock had come one day in a horse-car, when she heard an over-dressed young mother say to her little son in a loud whisper: "Give the old lady a seat." Before this Miss Theodora had certainly not thought of herself as old; but looking in the glass on her return home, she saw that the youth had vanished from her face. For though the over-dressed young mother might have said "oldish" more truly than "old," yet Miss Theodora realized that the change had come.
What it was she could scarcely define, save that there were now long lines on her cheek where once there had been curves, that her eyes were perhaps less bright, that gray hairs had begun to appear, and that certainly she had less color than formerly. All these changes had not come in a day, and yet in a day, in an hour, Miss Theodora realized them. As she looked in the mirror and saw that her gray hairs were still few enough to count, she glanced below the glass to the little faded photograph on the table. John had passed into the land of perpetual youth, and William, that other, had he begun to show the marks of age?