"Poor girl!" said Louise, and there was more than compassion in her voice; there was a curious undertone of determination, which made her husband smile, and wonder what this little woman, in whose capabilities he thoroughly believed, would do.
"Haven't I established the validity of our claim to being 'peculiar'?" he asked her.
"I should think you had! What has been the effect of the 'peculiarities' on John?"
Her husband's face instantly sobered, and there was a note of pain in his voice.
"John has broken loose from the restraints in a degree—in a painful degree. He has made his own associates; and they are of a kind that he wouldn't care to bring home, if he had an opportunity. He is away very frequently of evenings, it is difficult to tell where; but the daily decrease of anything like manliness attests the unfortunate result. I am more than suspicious that he is learning to drink something stronger than cider; and I am sure that he occasionally, at least, smokes—two vices that are my father's horror. He looks on with apparently mingled feelings of anger and dismay. His pet theories of family government have failed. He honestly desired to shield his children from evil influences; he is comparatively satisfied with the result both in Dorothy's case and mine. He doesn't know what to think of John. He has spells of great harshness and severity connected with him, thwarting everything that he undertakes in what must seem to John an utterly unreasonable way; and yet I believe it is done with a sore heart, and with an anxious desire for his good. And when my mother's face is most immovable, I have learned to know that she is trying to quiet the frightened beatings of her heart over the wrong-doings of her youngest boy."
"Lewis," his wife said, interrupting the next word, and with intense earnestness and solemnity in her voice, "we must save John for Christ, and his father and mother."
"Amen. But how, dear, how?"
"Lewis, let's go right downstairs. They are all at home; I noticed it as I came through the room; and they look so gloomy. Why shouldn't we all have a pleasant evening together? Did you ever read anything to them? I thought not. Now, don't you know they can't help enjoying your reading? I mean to try it right away."
"Read Shakespeare?" her husband asked dryly, albeit there was also dismay in his voice. To talk earnestly over a state of things, to wish that all was different, was one thing; and to plunge right into the midst of existing things, and try to make them differ, was quite another. His wife answered his question with a bright little laugh.
"No, I don't believe they would enjoy Shakespeare yet, though I am by no means sure that we can't have some good readings from him some time. But let me see; I have a book that I am certain they will all like. You never read it, and you ought to; it is worth any one's while to read it." And she let fall spool and scissors, and went in eagerness to the old-fashioned swinging-shelves, where she had arranged some of her favourite books, selecting one from among them. "Here it is," she said; "Estelle and I enjoyed this book wonderfully; so did papa. We read it while mamma was away one winter, when we were dreary without her. John will certainly be interested in the bear hunt; being a boy, he can't help it; and I know mother will like to hear about that poor mother down behind the beans."