This thought filled RoBards’ heart with a flood of overbrimming tenderness for Patty. He watched her when she tossed the newspaper to the floor and caught her more exciting baby from its cradle to her breast. She laughed and nuzzled the child and crushed him to her heart and made up barbaric new words to call him. Calling him Davie Junior and little Davikins was in itself a way of making love to her husband by the proxy of their child.
The sunlight that made a shimmering aureole about her flashed in her eyes shining with the tears of rapture. RoBards understood one thing at last about her: She wanted someone to caress and to defend.
He had always read her wrong. He had offered to be her champion and to shelter her under his strong arms. But Chalender had won her by being hungry for her and by stretching his arms upward to drag her down to him.
RoBards felt that he had never really won Patty because he had always been trying to be lofty and noble. She had rushed to him always when he was dejected or helpless with anger; but he had always lost her as soon as he recovered his self-control.
He wished that he might learn to play the weakling before her to keep her busy about him. But he could not act so uncongenial a part at home or abroad.
CHAPTER XVIII
After years of waiting and wrangling, labor conflicts, lawsuits, political battles, technical wars, and unrelenting financial difficulties and desperate expedients, through years of universal bankruptcy, the homely name of the Croton River acquired an almost Messianic significance in the popular heart.
There was already a nymph “Crotona” added to the city’s mythology. The thirsty citizens prayed her to hasten to their rescue from the peril of another fire, another plague, the eternal nuisance of going for water or going without.
Other history seemed of less importance, though tremendous revolutions had been effected in the democracy. The property qualification had been at last removed and the terrible risk assumed of letting all men vote without regard to their bank accounts. The religious requirements for office holders had also been annulled in all the states. There had been fierce riots, of course, but the promised anarchy had not followed. This gave a new boldness to the annoying fanatics who asked for three downright impossibilities: the abolition of slavery and of liquor, and the granting of equal rights to women.
Numbers of shameless females broke into public life and some of them into breeches. Mobs of conservatives raided their meetings, and chased them hither and yon; but still they raved and several effeminate or half-crazed men openly preached against slavery in the South. The bulk of the clergy of all denominations was, of course, against them.