And so they had advised and coerced, and destroyed individuality and independence, and extinguished, only too often, the very joy of life itself by striving to transfer the flame to a vessel of their own choosing.
This she must not do to Eric, Sheila told herself. From the despotic impulse of parenthood—queer mixture that it was of too zealous love and a thoroughly selfish desire for a second chance through the medium of the child—she must protect Eric. Therefore she restrained herself; she simply waited—as she might have waited for a seed to spring up from the secret sprouting place of some deep garden bed. It requires a sort of earthy, benign patience thus to hold back one's hand and passively wait—especially when one has, in spite of oneself, the dominating parent instinct!—but Sheila forced herself to it.
And then, when Eric was fourteen years old, the seed sprang up through the soil and turned its face to the light. The boy came to Sheila one day, obviously bent upon a confidence. Shy, hesitant, shamefaced he was, but so eager. She wanted to kiss him as he stood there before her, awkward and winsome, a little too tall for his knickerbockers, child and adolescent contending in his face and the flush of some portentous thing upon his cheek. She wanted to kiss him—but she didn't. For she divined that the moment was for sterner stuff than kisses.
"Mother, here's—here's a story I've written."
That was all; but Sheila saw her own youth, her hopes, her dreams in his eyes. What there was in her eyes she did not know, but at something there Eric suddenly exclaimed and put his arms around her.
And then Sheila knew that she was crying.
It was not a marvellous story—that first effort of her young son's—but something was there; something that raised the crude, immature pages above immaturity and crudity and made the little tale better than itself. And sensing it—that evanescent, impalpable, but infinitely promising thing—she saw the future shining through the present.
But it was not to Eric that she went first with her discovery. She longed to make the boy's path smooth for him before she sped him on it, and so she went first to Ted, story in hand.
Ted had not desired talent in his wife. Would he desire it in his son? Would he cheer and encourage, would he even tolerate, a dreamer, a poet, a worker in mere beauty? Would he ever regard art as more than a shadow of life?
Sheila sought him now to learn that—with Eric's story to plead for itself.