Barbara wrinkled her nose. "Allan Geragty is a smart aleck. I don't like him."
Emma murmured, "Dear, a choice of only two escorts! Yes, you may go."
"Thank you. I believe I'll set outside for a little while, Mother."
"All right."
Barbara opened the door and closed it quietly behind her. Emma knew that she was going only to look at the stars, and that was good because all young people should have trysts with stars. They might never pull one out of the sky and have it for their own, but they could always try. Emma fell into a mood of sober reflection.
The years had brought her a fair measure of wisdom, and at thirty-two she knew a great deal which she had not known when, at sixteen, she became Joe's wife. Among other things, she knew now that her father had been a martinet. He knew, he thought, the only true way, and all about him must follow or risk his wrath. If Emma regretted any years of her married life, it was the first five when she had insisted that she must not leave her father. But she had honestly known of nothing else that she might do.
Since babyhood she had been under her father's influence, and in his opinion women must always take a secondary place. One by one, as her six older brothers attained their majority, they had quarreled with their father and left home. Then the old man had suffered a series of spasms, and now Emma wondered if they were not simulated spasms designed to keep his last remaining child at his side. But she had loved him and pitied him and remained under his influence. She had brought upon her husband five painful and unproductive years. But those five years had taught Emma the true measure of Joe's worth. In spite of old Caleb's abuse, Joe had given him the fullest help of which a man is capable. He had been in the fields from the first light of morning until the last lingering glow of twilight. And he had waited without a word of complaint until Emma herself was willing to leave. With a fresh surge of love and gratitude she thought about his patient waiting, more difficult for him than for many another. Because he had waited until she was fully ready, she had felt obliged to conceal from him the real anguish she felt when, looking back from the wagon that was carrying them away, she saw Caleb, a strangely shrunken, isolated figure, standing in the doorway of his empty home.
But it was not only pity for Caleb that tore at her. It was that her own roots ran deep, that Caleb's home had been her home for all of her life, that now she and Joe and Barbara had no home at all other than the quarters that would be given to them on the farm where Joe would be working. To be without her own home was a personal agony that she had shared with no one, but it was an agony that had enabled her to save and scrimp and put aside every penny until she could hold out her hands to Joe with enough money in them to buy a place of their own.
Now she held the spare copper lamp base in her hands, and with a soft piece of cloth she rubbed it and rubbed it until she could see mirrored in it the smiling, contented outlines of her own face. For a few precious minutes she dared to hope that, in spite of the troublesome debt, their most difficult years were behind them.
Barbara came in, stifling a yawn with her hand. "I think I'll go to bed too, Mother."