Simeon dropped an eye to the glass of yellow foam. He looked hastily away. He particularly and fervently hated an egg—and an egg that foamed—“Bah!” He wrote savagely, the gentle odor stealing up wooingly, appealingly to his nostrils. He moved restlessly in his chair, throwing back his head, as if to shake it off. Then his hand reached out slowly—shook a little—and closed upon it.
John, with his back to him, went on slowly sorting papers. When he looked around, the glass, with its little flecks of foam, stood empty and Simeon was writing fiercely. The boy took the glass to the faucet and washed it, humming a little, gentle tune to himself as the water ran. The first step in a long and difficult way had been taken.
But no one knew better than John that it was only a first step and that the road ahead was strewn with difficulties.... It was at the seventh egg that Simeon rebelled openly, and John was forced to retire upon six-thankful to have achieved as much as this, and thankful to have discovered the limit. “As many as you can get into him,” the physician had said. John had not known what this number might be, until the day of the explosion—when the seventh egg was proffered and rejected.
He had swept up the fragments of glass and repaired damages with grateful heart.... Six a day was the limit. But there ought to be a great deal of nourishment in six eggs.
That there was, Simeon’s conduct proved. He rose to a kind of new, fierce strength that exhausted itself each day.
“He ’s just eggs!” thought the youth, watching him gloomily. “He has n’t gained an inch. It all goes into work.” And he set himself anew to spare the nervous, driven frame.
There were times when he hoped, for a little, that a permanent gain had been made. But an emergency would arise and three days would be used up in one blaze of wrath.
The C., B. and L. was tireless in its attacks, goading him on, nagging him—now here, now there—till he shook his nervous fists, palpitating, in air.
“They’ve held back those machines on purpose,” he said, one morning, late in September.
“Those machines” were a consignment of harvesters, sidetracked somewhere along the C., B. and L. and not to be located. The “B. and Q.” had been telegraphing frantically for weeks—only to receive cool and regretful apologies. Farmers were besieging the road. A whole crop depended on the issue.