“What?”
“That if you do yield, if you do what you oughtn’t to, you’ll write and tell me about it?” Mrs. Stirling put her arms about Peter’s neck, and looked wistfully into his face.
Peter was not blind to what this world is. Perhaps, had his mother known it as he did, she might have seen how unfair her petition was. He did not like to say yes, and could not say no.
“I’ll try to go straight, mother,” he replied, “but that’s a good deal to promise.”
“It’s all I’m going to ask of you, Peter,” urged Mrs. Stirling.
“I have gone through four years of my life with nothing in it I couldn’t tell her,” thought Peter. “If that’s possible, I guess another four is.” Then he said aloud, “Well, mother, since you want it, I’ll do it.”
The reason of Peter’s eagerness to get to New York, was chiefly to have something definite to do. He tried to obtain this distraction of occupation, at present, in a characteristic way, by taking excessively long walks, and by struggling with his mother’s winter supply of wood. He thought that every long stride and every swing of the axe was working him free from the crushing lack of purpose that had settled upon him. He imagined it would be even easier when he reached New York. “There’ll be plenty to keep me busy there,” was his mental hope.
All his ambitions and plans seemed in a sense to have become meaningless, made so by the something which but ten days before had been unknown to him. Like Moses he had seen the promised land. But Moses died. He had seen it, and must live on without it. He saw nothing in the future worth striving for, except a struggle to forget, if possible, the sweetest and dearest memory he had ever known. He thought of the epigram: “Most men can die well, but few can live well.” Three weeks before he had smiled over it and set it down as a bit of French cynicism. Now—on the verge of giving his mental assent to the theory, a pair of slate-colored eyes in some way came into his mind, and even French wit was discarded therefrom.
Peter was taking his disappointment very seriously, if quietly. Had he only known other girls, he might have made a safe recovery, for love’s remedy is truly the homeopathic “similia similibus curantur,” woman plural being the natural cure for woman singular. As the Russian in the “Last Word” says, “A woman can do anything with a man—provided there is no other woman.” In Peter’s case there was no other woman. What was worse, there seemed little prospect of there being one in the future.