“What for, dear?” Becky’s gray eyes twinkled behind her glasses. “Going to be an artist?”
“Not exactly pictures,” Jean answered with dignity. “Textile design.”
“Well, whatever it is, I guess it will hold over for a year while you go up to the country and learn to keep house. Kit here can go to high school. It’s seven miles away, but there’s a school bus that picks up those who live too far away to walk. It’s real handy.”
Kit’s eyes signaled to Jean, and Jean’s to Doris and Tommy. A fleeting vision of that “handy” trip to high school in the dead of winter appeared before them.
“What do you think of it, dear?” asked Mr. Craig, looking longingly up at the face of his wife. “It would be a great comfort and relief to me to get back to those old hills, but it doesn’t seem fair to you or the children. The sacrifice is too great. They do need the right kind of environment, as you say. Suppose we left Jean where she could keep up her studies, and perhaps put Kit into a private school. Then I might go up home with Becky, and you and the two younger ones could go out to California to Benita Ranch—”
But Mrs. Craig laid her fingers on his lips.
“You’re not going to banish us to Benita Ranch. If you think it is the best thing to do, Tom, we’ll all go with you. Wherever you go, I’m going.”
Doris laid her hand over Jean’s, and they stepped out softly. Their mother, they saw, needed to be alone with their father. They fled downstairs to the study back of the living room and were followed by Kit and Tommy who were already deep in an argument about the entire situation.
“I don’t think it’s right to move up there,” Doris said, judicially. “We may not like it at all, and there we’d be just the same, stuck in a rut, and maybe we never could get out of it, and we’d grow old and look just like Becky and talk like her and everything.”
“Take it easy, kid, be careful of what you say,” Kit said sharply. “Becky is odd in some ways but she influences a lot of people in her home town. And here too. I wish I had half her common sense.”