"You can't break up what you haven't got. Aside from you, why should I call this place home? I work here, and get my board and clothes. Well, I can work other places, and get my board and clothes. If I've got to be a cog in a money-making machine, I will at least choose the machine."
"What plans have you made? Where are you going?"
"Haven't made any plans, and don't know where I'm going. But I'm going. At present that's enough. The plans will come along as they're needed."
"Have you any money?" asked the mother, with a brisk effort at cheerfulness. She was already planning for her daughter in the new world she was about to enter.
"Enough to start me. That's all I need. I can earn more. It's not work I'm afraid of, although I suppose father won't be able to see it that way. He'll put all this down to laziness and obstinacy. It's neither. It's just a plain human craving to live."
"I sometimes wonder whether I'll be able to stand it through to the end," her mother whispered, somewhat fearfully, as though frightened by the admission. "I've—I've seen it coming with you, and I can't help feeling that perhaps this is only the beginning."
"Oh, mother, if you should!" cried the girl. "That would do it—that would open his eyes. He'd see then that there is something in the world besides wheat and cows, after all. You know, I think he's in a kind of trance. He's mesmerized by wheat. It was so necessary in those first years, when he was fighting against actual starvation, that it has become a kind of mania. Nothing short of some great shock will bring him out of it. If you would come—if you would only come too, things would be different."
"But I couldn't do that," said the mother, after a silence, and as though speaking with herself. "He's my husband, Beulah. You don't understand."
They talked then, in secret, sorrowful confidence, of many things, things for their ears only, and the grey was returning in the northern sky when the girl again left the house, and this time swung resolutely down the road that led to Plainville. Her heart was now at rest, even at peace. In the sacred communion of that last hour she had come to see something of her mother's problem and sacrifice; and although she was going out into the world alone, she felt that somewhere, some time, was a solution that would reunite the broken family and tune their varying chords in harmony. The North star shone very brightly amid the myriad finer points of light that filled the heavens. She raised her face to the cold rays. The stars had always a strange fascination for her. Their illimitable distances, their infinite number, their ordered procession—all spelled to her a Purpose—a Purpose that was bigger than wheat and land and money, a Purpose that was life, the life for which she groped vaguely but bravely in the darkness.
From an unhappy sleep in his room upstairs John Harris was awakened by the whine of the cream separator. A quiet smile stole across his strong, still handsome face. "Beulah has decided to be sensible," he whispered to himself.