“She’s gone, Elmer. She called me up on the telephone from Albany to tell me. The Crystal Fillum Company offers her a contract. She wants her clothes and her money.”
A heavy colour surged through the man’s face.
“That’s the danged secret blood in her,” he said. “I knowed it. There’s allus sunthin’ hatchin’ deep down in women of her blood.... She’s allus had it in her mind to quit us.... She never was one of us.... All right, let her go. I’m done with her.”
Mazie began unsteadily: “So many children of—of our day seem to feel like our Eris——”
“Mine don’t! My boys ain’t got nothin’ secret into them! They ain’t crazy in the head ’n’ they ain’t full o’ fool notions.”
Mazie remained silent. Her sons were fuller of “notions” than their father knew. It had required all the magnetism of her affection and authority to keep them headed toward a future on Whitewater Farms. For the nearest town was already calling them; they sniffed the soft-coal smoke from afar and were restless for the iron dissonance and human bustle of paved and narrow ways.
Theirs was the gregarious excitement instinct in human animals. Beyond the dingy monochrome of life they caught a glimmer of distant brightness. The vague summons of unknown but suspected pleasures stirred them as they travelled the sodden furrow.
Youth’s physical instinct is to gather at the water-hole of this vast veldt we call the world, and wallow in the inviting mire of a thousand hoofs, and feel and hear and see the perpetual milling of the human herds that gather there.
Only in quality did Eris differ from her brothers. It was her mind—and the untasted pleasures of the mind—that drove her to the common fount.
There is a picture by Fragonard called “The Fountain of Love.” And, as eagerly as the blond and glowing girl speeds to the brimming basin where mischievous little winged Loves pour out for her the magic waters, so impetuously had Eris sped toward the fount of knowledge, hot, parched with desire to set her lips to immortal springs.