"We'll have to excuse him, Rudd; it's his first pair of boots."
Rudd's heart was sore within him, and he was oppressed with guilt. He had never bought Eric his first pair of brass-toed boots! And he a shoe clerk!
So that night Eric had to be reduced several years, brought out of school, and taken to St. Louis. Rudd knew what an epoch-making event this was, and he wanted Eric to select from a larger stock than the meager and out-of-date supply of Kittredge's Emporium—though this admission was only for Rudd's own family. The thumb-screw could not have wrung it from him for the public.
There was a similar mix-up about Eric's first long trousers which Rudd likewise overlooked. He accomplished the Irish miracle of the tight boots. Eric had worn his breeches a long while before he put them on for the first time.
To the outer knowledge of the stranger or the neighbor, William Rudd's employer had all the good luck that was coming to him, and all of Rudd's besides. They were antitheses at every point.
Where Rudd was without ambition, importance, family, or funds, Kittredge was the richest man in town, the man of most impressive family, and easily the leading citizen. People began to talk him up for Congressman, maybe for Senator. He had held all the other conspicuous offices in his church, his bank, his county. You could hardly say that he had ever run for any office; he had just walked up and taken it.
Yet Rudd did not envy him his record or his family. Clay Kittredge had children, real children. The cemetery lodged none of them. Yet one of the girls or boys was always ill or in trouble with somebody; Mrs. Kittredge was forever cautioning her children not to play with Mrs. So-and-so's children and Mrs. So-and-so would return the compliment. The town was fairly torn up with these nursery Guelph and Ghibelline wars.
Rudd compared the wickednesses of other people's children with the perfections of Eric. Sometimes his evil genius whispered a bitter thought that if Eric had lived to enter the world this side of the tobacco smoke, he, too, might have been a complete scoundrel in knee-breeches, instead of the clean-hearted, clear-skinned, studious, truthful little gentleman of light and laughter and love that he was. But Rudd banished the thought.
Eric was never ill, or only ill enough at times to give the parents a little of the rapture of anxiety and of sitting by his bedside holding his hand and brushing his hair back from a hot forehead. Eric never was impolite, or cruel to an animal, or impudent to a teacher, or backward in a class.
And Rudd's wife differed from Kittredge's wife and wives in general—and indeed from the old Martha herself—in staying young and growing more and more beautiful. The old Martha had been too shy and too cognizant of the truth ever to face a camera; and Rudd often regretted that he owned not even a bridal photograph such as the other respectable married folks of Hillsdale had on the wall, or in a crayon enlargement on an uneasy easel. He had no likeness of Martha except that in his heart. But thereby his fancy was unshackled and he was enabled to imagine her sweeter, fairer, every day.