"I'm not so sure. I'm beginning to think it's the money that's in the farm your father's heart is set on. If the money was to be made somewhere else his heart would soon shift."
"Mother!" exclaimed the girl. In twenty years it was the first word approaching disloyalty she had heard from her mother's lips, and she could hardly trust her ears. It was nothing for Beulah to criticize her father; that was her daily custom, and she pursued it with the whole frankness of her nature. But her mother had always defended, sometimes mildly chiding, but never admitting either weakness or injustice on the part of John Harris.
"Well, I just can't stand it much longer," said the mother, the emotions which she had so long held in check overcoming her. "Here I've slaved and saved until I'm an—an old woman, and what better are we for it? We've better things to eat and more things to wear and a bigger house to keep clean, and your father thinks we ought to be satisfied. But he isn't satisfied himself. He's slaving harder than ever, and now he's got this notion about going West. Oh, you'll see it will come to that. He knows our life isn't complete, and he thinks more money will complete it. All the experience of twenty years hasn't taught him any better."
Beulah stood aghast at this outburst, and when her mother paused and looked at her, and she saw the unbidden wells of water gathering in the tender eyes, the girl could no longer restrain herself. With a cry she flung her arms about her mother's neck, and for a few moments the two forgot their habitual restraint and were but naked souls mingling together.
"It's a shame," exclaimed Beulah at length. "We're not living; we're just existing. When I get among people that are really living—like the Grants, over there—you don't know how mortified and mean I feel. And it's not that alone—it's the sense of loss, the sense that life is going by and I'm not making the best of it. You know we are missing the real thing; we are just living on the husks, and father is so blind he thinks the husks are the grain itself."
"Your father is hungry, too," said the mother. "Hungry—hungry, and he thinks that more land, more money, more success, will fill him. And in the meantime he's forgetting the things that would satisfy—the love that was ours, the little devo—Oh, child, what am I saying? What an unfaithful creature I am! You must forget, Beulah, you must forget these words—words of shame they are!"
"The shame is his," declared the girl, defiantly, "and I won't stand this nonsense about homesteading again—I just won't stand it. If he says anything more about it I'll—I'll fly off, that's what I'll do. And I've a few remarks for him about Riles that won't keep much longer. The old badger—he's at the bottom of all this."
"You mustn't quarrel with your father, dearie, you mustn't do that."
"I'm not going to quarrel with him, but I'm going to say some things that need saying. And if it comes to a show-down, and he must go—well, he must, but you and I will stay with the old farm, won't we, mother?"
But the mother's thought now was for quelling the storm in the turbulent heart of her daughter. Beulah's nature was not one to lend itself to passive submission, nor yet passive resistance. She was the soul of loyalty, but with that loyalty she combined a furious intolerance of things as they should not be. She had not yet reached the philosophic age, but she was old enough to value life, and to know that what she called the real things were escaping here. At night, as she looked up at the myriad stars spangling the heavens, the girl's heart was filled with an unutterable yearning; a sense of restriction, of limitation, of loss—a sense that somewhere lay a Purpose and a Plan, and that only by becoming part of that Plan could life be lived to the fullest. Her mother was of a different nature, not less brave, but more resigned; content to fill, without question, the niche to which fate assigned her; accepting conditions as a matter of course. Yet at times she had inklings of those deeper questions which arose in persistent interrogations before her child, and she guessed that if Beulah once became convinced that she saw the Plan, not all her loyalty could dissuade her from following it. So she strove to control the sudden outburst in her own heart lest the fire lighted in Beulah's should break forth in conflagration.