"I am afraid not, Belle! Steve is too good a man, that is the trouble. I don't say this to him. I wouldn't take a particle of hope from him. But I know Steve all through: he isn't the kind to impress people, to get on,—and he is no longer young."
"It is such a pity he left the railroad," Isabelle mused. "John says they are turning men off instead of taking them on, or he might have found a position for him."
"Never!" Alice's eyes flamed. "If it had to be done over, even now, we should do the same thing…. Steve is slow and quiet, never says much, but he does a lot of thinking. And when he makes up his mind, he sticks…. When he saw what it meant to take that position in the traffic department, what he would have to know and do, he couldn't do it. It is useless trying to make a man like Steve live contrary to his nature. You can't bend a big, thick tree any way you want it."
"But, Alice, he might have been wrong!" Isabelle protested, coloring.
"Yes,—he might have been wrong," Alice admitted, her eyes falling. "But Steve couldn't see it any other way. So he had to do as he did…. And the lumber business failed. I was afraid it would! Dear Steve! He wasn't fitted to fight with those men, to see that they didn't cheat him."
It was later that Alice uttered the deep cry of her heart.
… "Don't think, Belle, that I mind the hard times, the work and all; not even the school for Ned, and the poor prospect for the children. After all, they may do as well without the advantages we could have given them. But what breaks my heart is to see Steve, who is bigger and abler and stronger than most men, go down to the bottom of the ladder and have to take his orders from an ignorant little German. It's small of me, I know, and Steve doesn't complain. But it seems to me terribly unjust somehow."
For a moment her feeling overcame her; then she recovered her composure and continued: "But then, it's Steve! And I wouldn't have him a particle different, not for all the success in the world. You see I have my pride, my snobbery. I am a snob about my husband."
The boys came in from school, and the house shook with racketing children.
"They don't know what has happened, really,—they are too young, thank Heaven!" Alice exclaimed. "And I don't mean they ever shall know—ever think they are poor."