"I don't know," answered Georgia, shutting the door.
It was not until the next morning that she discovered the loss of her money.
V
FOR IDLE HANDS TO DO
The old man had gone to Europe for his summer vacation, leaving Georgia secure in her place with nothing to worry about. She had no more than half work to do. Business had slackened and the whole office was in the doldrums. Life's fitful fever had abated to subnormal placidity. Even her mother's chronic indignation over trifles had been quieted by the summer's drowse.
The only interesting moments in Georgia's day were nine o'clock when she came and five o'clock when she left—noon on Saturdays. The Sundays were amazingly dull.
So was her home. Al stayed away from it from breakfast unto bedtime, with a brief interval for supper. He was engrossed in prairie league baseball for one thing. That occupied him all day Sunday and half of Saturday. Of course he couldn't play after dark, but whenever Georgia asked him where he was going as he bolted from the table with his cap, he answered, "Out to see some fellahs."
If she hoped that he would stay at home to-night, for he was out last night and the one before, he would explain, with as much conviction as if he offered a clinching argument, that "the fellahs" were a-calling and he must go.
She was rather put out to find herself unable to speak with the same vehemence and authority to him as she had been able to use with Jim concerning the folly and wickedness of going out after supper. For when it comes to putting fingers on a man's destiny, a wife is a more effective agency than a sister. Even in unhappy marriages husband and wife are as two circles which intersect. They have common, identical ground between them. It may not be large, but such as it is it inevitably gives them moments of oneness. Brother and sister are as two circles, whose rims just touch. They may be very near each other, but at no time are they each other.
Georgia's restlessness and discontent increased as the summer went on, probably because she was affecting nobody else's destiny to any calculable extent. Her young brother Al kept away, perhaps warned by a deep race instinct that sisters are not meant to affect destinies. Her old mother was a settled case already. She wouldn't change; she couldn't change; she could hardly be modified, except by the weather or the rheumatism; she would merely grow old and die. No satisfaction for a young adventurous woman in experimenting on such a soul.