She held her arms out to the mist, vaguely, blindly, demanding some compensation for living, some justification that she knew not of. And there in the vigil of the misty night the woman was born. From a soft, yielding, dreaming, feminine thing, there was born a new soul—definite, hard, and precise in its judgment of men and life....
In the house behind her slept her husband and her two boys,—her children and his. But only in the words of the sentimentalists are children a sufficient joy to woman's heart. Loving as she was by nature, nevertheless she asked more of God than her two boys, whose little lives no longer clung to hers by the bonds of extreme infancy. They were growing to become men; they, too, like her husband, would descend into the market for the game which all men play. The fear of it gripped her heart.
And at last she wept, miserably, for the forlorn wreck of her worship, longing for the glorious man she had once adored.
The next morning she said to her husband:—
"Francis, I want to go back to the city this winter."
"Well—there's time to think of it—you may change your mind by the fall."
She said no more, but the first step in her new life had been taken.
CHAPTER XVIII
Everett Wheeler could hardly be reckoned as a man of sentiment. Yet in the matter of selecting an architect for the new school he stood out persistently against the wishes of Pemberton and Judge Phillips, with but one sentimental argument,—the Powers Jackson trustees must give the commission for building the great school to the nephew of the founder, without holding a competitive trial of any sort.