“You must sit on my bed,” Helena insisted.
“No, mine!” Gregory cried; and, as he settled by his daughter, “For every minute you're there, father, you must sit here. Guess what I have with me.” Lee Randon had no idea, and Gregory produced a willow switch. “That's for anybody who isn't good.”
There was a wriggle down under the blanket, and Lee leaned forward; “Are those your feet?” he demanded; “do you go that far down, are you that tall?”
“Gracious, that's nothing,” Helena cut in; “just see where I go.” He discovered that her active toes were almost under the end bar of the bed. The covers were moulded by her firm body. In a few years, he thought with a constricted throat, Helena would be grown up, flung into the complex troubles of maturity. However, he knew, life wouldn't greatly upset her—she had a calmness more stolid than Fanny's together with his own sharpened sensibilities: it was probable that she would marry soon.
Gregory was different; while Helena, in small ways, was unamenable, he was as good as the gold stars he continually got for admirable conduct. He had a deliberate, careful mind and, already, a sense of responsibilities. He spoke slowly, giving the impression that the selection of words was a heavy business; where Helena's speech came in careless rushes. Gregory, too, Lee Randon told himself, would not be at a loss later. The two children actually demanded very little from him now beyond the love they took for granted and its obvious return. But, for his part, did he give them much, indeed, any more? Was there, Lee wondered, a deficiency in his sense of parenthood?
He knew men all of whose labor was for their children; they slaved to have comfortable sums against their children's futures; they schemed and talked, often fatuously, for and about their sons and, in lesser degree, daughters. They were, in short, wholly absorbed, no more than parents; at the advent of a family they lost individuality, ambition, initiative; nature trapped them, blotted them out; it used them for its great purpose and then cast them aside, just as corporations used men for a single task and dropped them when their productiveness was over.
But he wasn't like that, it might well be unfortunately. His personality, his peculiar needs, had survived marriage; the vague longings of youth had not been entirely killed. They were still potent and still nameless; they had refused to be gathered into a definition as exact as ambition. Lee had moved to Gregory's bed, and was holding one of the small warm hands, inattentive to the eager clamor of voices. Perhaps his ambition had vanished when he had left the first plan of his future for the more tangible second: there wasn't much in the material industry of iron founding, nor in his present wider activities, to satisfy the imagination.
Taking the place of that, he had an uncommon amount of energy, vitality, a force of some kind or other. Whatever he undertook he followed with a full vigorous sweep; he was successful in convincing a large proportion of the people with whom he dealt that their ends were the same as his; and here, as well, chance, fate, had been with Lee—no one, practically, had lost through a belief in him.
His situation today, he wholly and gladly admitted, had resulted from the money Fanny brought him. Until his marriage he had been confined to the Magnolia Iron Works; of which, it was conceivable, he would in time be manager, maybe, much later, part owner. But, with fresh resources, he tried fresh fields, investments, purchases, every one of which prospered. He owned or operated or controlled an extraordinary diversity of industries—a bottling works for nonalcoholic beverages, a small structural steel plant, the Eastlake daily paper—a property that returned forty per cent on his capital—a box works, purchased before the war, with an output that had leaped, almost over night, from thousands to millions, a well-known cigarette—
His energies, forever turning from routine paths and stereotyped preoccupations, took him vividly into countless phases of existence. He had accumulated nearly a million dollars and Fanny's affairs had benefited greatly; his administration of her money had been rigid: but—for whatever it was worth—his wife had, in liberating him from the company of the super-hot cupolas, made it all possible.