Dorothy had never forgotten the child Sheila, and the two women resumed their acquaintance, their souls little changed, for all their bodily evolution. They were still two little girls playing with dolls. They were still utterly incomprehensible to each other, and the friendlier for that fact. Dorothy found Sheila a trifle insane, but immensely interesting, and Sheila found Dorothy stodgily Philistine, but thoroughly reliable, as normal as a yardstick.
Sheila gave to her two children all the adoration of a Madonna. They were fascinating toys to her; though at times she tired of them. She entertained them with all her talents, wasting on the infantile private audience graces and gifts that the public would have paid thousands of dollars to see.
But the children tired of their expensive toy, too, and preferred a rag doll or a little tin automobile that banged into chair legs and turned over at the edge of a rug.
Sheila had nursed her babies with an ecstatic pride. That was more than many of the village women did. She had been amazed to learn how many bottle-fed infants there were in town. Dorothy herself strongly recommended one or two foods prepared in other factories than the mother’s veins.
Dorothy was not the mother one meets in romance, but very much like the mothers next door and across the street—the ones the doctors know. Her children drove her into storms of impatience and outbursts of temper. Now and then she had to get away from them for half a day or for many days. If she could not escape on a shopping prowl to some other city she would send them off with the nurse under instructions to stay as long as the light held out. She welcomed their visits to relatives, she encouraged them to play in other people’s yards. Other mothers with headaches urged their children to play in one another’s yards. Nobody knew very well where they played or at what.
Dorothy was a violent anti-suffragist and the head of the local league, whose motto was that woman’s place is in the home. She was kept away from home a good deal in the furtherance of this creed.
Jim Greeley, the normal business man, spent his days at his desk, his evenings at his club, and his free afternoons at baseball games. Sometimes he added a little variety to the peace of his household by rolling in late, lyrical and incoherent.
There was a general impression about town that he found his home so well ordered that he sought a recreative disorder elsewhere. From the first meeting with him Sheila disliked the way he looked at her. His eyes, as it were, crossed swords with hers playfully and said, “Do you fence?” She found the compliments he murmured to her whenever opportunities arrived uncomfortably unctuous. But there was nothing that she could openly resent.
In the summer all the wives of Blithevale whose husbands had the money or could borrow it followed the national custom and went to the seashore, the mountains, anywhere to get away from home and husband; they took the children with them. The husbands stuck to their jobs and made occasional dashes to their families. All signs fail in hot weather. Even the churches close up. It is curious. It is even agreed that the rule about woman’s place being the home does not hold in hot weather.
Dorothy and Sheila and their youngsters went together one summer to a beach with nearly as much boardwalk as sand.