“I am not going to let you ruin the biggest day in his life.”
She saw that he meant it. She was incredulous, reckless, angry, and thwarted for the first time in her self-indulgent life.
“I hate you,” she said slowly. “I hate you!”
She turned and went slowly up the stairs. Graham, knocking at her door a few minutes later, heard the sound of hysterical sobbing, within, but received no reply.
“Good-by, mother,” he called. “Good-by. Don't worry. I'll be all right.”
When he saw she did not mean to open the door or to reply, he went rather heavily down the stairs.
“I wish she wouldn't,” he said. “It makes me darned unhappy.”
But Clayton surmised a relief behind his regret, and in the train the boy's eyes were happier than they had been for months.
“I don't know how I'll come out, dad,” he said. “But if I don't get through it won't be because I didn't try.”
And he did try. The enormous interest of the thing gripped him from the start; There was romance in it, too. He wore his first uniform, too small for him as it was, with immense pride. He rolled out in the morning at reveille, with the feeling that he had just gone to bed, ate hugely at breakfast, learned to make his own cot-bed, and lined up on a vast dusty parade ground for endless evolutions in a boiling sun.