Mrs. Martha Rudd was an ambitious woman, or at least restless and discontented. Having escaped her supreme horror, that of being an old maid, she began to grow ambitious for her husband. She nagged him for a while about his plodding ways, the things that satisfied him, the salary he endured. But it did no good. Will Rudd was never meant to put boots and spurs on his own feet and splash around in gore. He was for carpet slippers, round-toed shoes, and on wet days, rubbers; on slushy days he even descended to what he called "ar'tics."
Not understanding the true majesty of her husband's long-distance dreams, and baffled by his unresponse to her ambitions for him, Martha grew ambitious for the child that was coming. She grew frantically, fantastically ambitious. Here was something William Rudd could respond to. He could be ambitious as Cæsar—but not for himself. He was a groundling, but his son should climb.
Husband and wife spent evenings and evenings debating the future of the child. They never agreed on the name—or the alternative names. For it is advisable to have two ready for any emergency. But the future was rosy. They were unanimous on that—President of the United States, mebbe; or at least the President's wife.
Mrs. Rudd, who occasionally read the continued stories in the evening paper, had happened on a hero named "Eric." She favored that name—or Gwendolynne (with a "y"), as the case might be. In any event, the child's future was so glowing that it warmed Mrs. Rudd to asking one evening, forgetful of her earlier edict:
"Why don't you smoke your pipe any more, Will?"
"I'd kind o' got out of the habit, Marthy," he said, and added, hastily, "but I guess I'll git back in."
Thereafter they sat of evenings by the lamp, he smoking, she sewing things—holding them up now and then for him to see. They looked almost too small to be convincing, until he brought home from the store a pair of shoes—"the smallest size made, Marthy, too small for some of the dolls you see over at Bostwick's."
It was the golden period of his life. Rudd never sold shoes so well. People could hardly resist his high spirits. Anticipation is a great thing—it is all that some people get.
To be a successful shoe clerk one must acquire the patience of Job without his gift of complaint, and Rudd was thoroughly schooled. So he waited with a hope-lit serenity the preamble to the arrival of his—her—their child.
And then fate, which had previously been content with denying him comforts and keeping him from luxuries, dealt him a blow in the face, smote him on his patient mouth. The doctor told him that the little body of his son had been born still. After that it was rather a stupor of despair than courage that carried him through the vain struggle for life of the worn-out housewife who became only almost a mother. It seemed merely the logical completion of the world's cruelty when the doctor laid a heavy hand on his shoulder and walked out of the door, without leaving any prescription to fill. Rudd stood like a wooden Indian, too dazed to understand or to feel. He opened the door to the undertaker and waited outside the room, just twiddling his fingers and wondering. His world had come to an end and he did not know what to do.