"It's in the air, Father, this mania for 'doing things.' It's the ridiculous renaissance of the commonplace, long submerged. Every college youth, every school girl writes a novel; every janitor, every office boy a scenario. The stage to-day teems with sales-ladies and floor-walkers; the pants-presser and the manufacturer of ladies' cloaks direct the newest art of the moving pictures. Printers' devils and ex-draymen fill the papers with their draughtsmanship; head-waiters write the scores for musical productions. Art is in the air. So why shouldn't Steve believe herself capable of creating a few things? She'll get over it."
"I hope she will."
"She will. Steve is a reasonable child."
"Steve is a sweet, intelligent and reasonable girl.... Very impressionable.... And sensitive.... I hope," he added irrelevantly, "that I shall live a few years more."
"You hadn't contemplated anything to the contrary, had you?" inquired Jim.
They both smiled. Then Cleland Senior said in his pleasant, even way:
"One can never tell.... And in case you and Steve have to plod along without me some day, before either of you are really wise enough to dispense with my invaluable advice, try to understand her, Jim. Try always; try patiently.... Because I made myself responsible.... And, for all her honesty and sweetness and her obedience, Jim, there is—perhaps—restless blood in Steve.... There may even be the creative instinct in her also.... She's very young to develop it yet—to show whether it really is there and amounts to anything.... I should like to live long enough to see—to guide her for the next few years——"
"Of course you are going to live to see Steve's kiddies!" cried the young fellow in cordially scornful protest. "You know perfectly well, Father, that you don't look your age!"
"Don't I?" said Cleland Senior, with a faint smile.
"And you feel all right, don't you, Father?" insisted the boy in that rather loud, careless voice which often chokes tenderness between men. For the memory that these two shared in common made them doubly sensitive to the lightest hint that everything was not entirely right with either.