Joe laughed.
"Well, perhaps I'd better. I'm ashamed to ask for anything home this hour—in fact, I'm scared to."
So he got his fried eggs and coffee, and the family hung around him, and Joe, circled with such warm friendliness, was glad to be alive. He was especially pleased with Mrs. Rann's regard. But Joe was always a favorite with mothers. Possibly because he was so fond of their babies. Possibly because mothers love a good son, wherever they find one. Possibly because his heart was large enough to contain as something precious their obscure lives. Just before he left John asked him:
"Will the printery soon be running, Mr. Joe?"
"Tell you later," murmured Joe, and went out. But he was sorely troubled.
However, to Joe there had been revealed—almost in a day and after thirty-eight years of insulated life—two of the supreme human facts. There was humanity, on the one side, building the future, the new state, organizing its scattered millions into a rich, healthy, joyous life and calling to every man to enlist in the ranks of the creators; and then there was woman, the undying splendor of the world, the beauty that drenches life with meaning and magic, that stirs the elemental in a man, that wakens the race instinct, that demands the creation of new generations to inhabit that new state of the future. Intertwined, these wondrous things drew the heart now this way, now that, and to Joe they arose separately in intermittent pulsations that threatened to absorb his existence.
He did not dare go to Myra until he was sure of himself. It seemed that he would have to choose between woman and work. It seemed as if his work would lead into peril, dirt, disaster, and that he could not ask a delicate, high-strung woman to go with him. The woman could not follow her warrior to the battle, for marriage meant children to Joe, and the little ones must stay back at home with the mother.
In that moment of clear terror he had said to Myra:
"I may never see you again…. I belong to those dead girls."
And this phrase came and went like a refrain. He must choose between her and those "dead girls." There stood Myra with gray luminous eyes and soft echoing voice magically hinting of a life of ever-renewed romance. She had a breast for his aching head, she had in her hands a thousand darling household things, she had in her the possibilities of his own children … who should bring a wind of laughter into his days and a strange domestic tenderness. The depths of the man were stirred by these appeals—that was the happy human way to take, the common road fringed with wild flowers and brier-lost berries, and glorious with the stride of health and the fresh open air.