CHAPTER II
The house seemed still to quiver after the neighbors’ young had left. Mrs. Vickery moved about restoring order. And Dorothy bustled after her, full of talk and snickers. But Eugene curled up in a chair by a window as solemn as Sophokles.
Mrs. Vickery was still thinking of Sheila. She asked first of her, “How did you come to meet this little Kemble girl?”
Dorothy explained: “Oh, I telephoned Clyde Burbage to come over and play, and he said he couldn’t, ’cause they had comp’ny; and I said, ‘Bring comp’ny along,’ and he did, and she’s his cousin; her grandma lives at his house, and her papa and mamma are going to visit there at Clyde’s for a week. Isn’t Sheila a case, mamma? She says the funniest things. I wish I could ’member some of ’em.”
Mrs. Vickery smiled and stared at Dorothy. In the grand lottery of children she had drawn Dorothy. She saw in the child many of her own traits, many of the father’s traits. She loved Dorothy, of course, and had much good reason for her instinctive devotion, and many rewards for it. And yet the child was singularly talentless, as her father was, as Mrs. Vickery confessed herself to be.
She wondered at the strange distribution of human gifts—some dowered from their cradles with the workaday virtues and commonplace vices, and some mysteriously flecked with a kind of wildness that is both less and more than virtue, an oddity that gives every speech or gesture an unusual emphasis, a rememberable differentness.
Dorothy was a safe child to have; she would make a reliable, admirable, good woman. But Mrs. Vickery felt that if Sheila had been her child she would have been incessantly afraid of the girl and for her, incessantly uncertain of the future. Yet, she would have watched her, and the neighbors would have watched her, with a breathless fascination as one watches a tight-rope walker who moves on a hazardous path, yet moves above the heads of the crowd and engages all its eyes.
Little Eugene Vickery had a quirk of the unusual, but it was not conspicuous; he was a burrower, who emerged like a mole in unexpected places, and led a silent, inconspicuous life gnawing at the roots of things.
His mother found him now, as so often, taciturn, brooding, thinking long thoughts—the solemnest thing there is, a solemn child.
“Why are you so silent, Eugene?” she said.