“It’s a classic! It’s been told all over the map, and printed and reprinted till you’d think the mama would be ashamed to show herself on a platform. Of course, I figure there was a good deal of truth in it, though I’ll admit it was a pretty fresh thing to say. Mrs. Parker is a grand old gal, but she’s one of these eight-day, self-winding, Do-Gooders—you know! Always cleaning up a slum or starting a movement or something, and I guess Peter’s just naturally so sick of it he goes the limit the other way. (No, now—you can wait a minute!) You can’t high-hat me out of telling my bun mut! Well, it was in one of the colleges where they hadn’t canned him yet, and the Y.M.C.A. lads were giving a dinner to their mothers, and, of course, Mrs. Parker would be the noblest Roman of them all, and they were nuts to have her, only she was clear across the map, uplifting something, and telegraphed her regrets. Well, then they figured that the next best would be to get her son, and have him respond to the toast—‘Our Mothers!’”
Her listener showed signs of extreme restiveness and Miss Jennings laid firm hands upon her.
“Well, in a weak moment he allows he’ll do it, and then, on the big night, forgets all about it. There they are, all set, and r’aring to go, and no Peter Parker. So they start a still hunt all over the landscape, including some choice spots where those good little Y.M.C.A. had never been before, and finally they run him down, only slightly the worse for wear, and get him into his uni, and deliver him at the speaker’s table. Well, by that time Peter is just about as near sore as Peter ever could be, because he was just slipping into high for a really good night, and this whole thing leaves him cold, and he figures that it’s all the mama’s fault for being such a front-page special, so when the poor old toast master sees him there at last, clothed and in his right mind, he makes a long and fancy introduction, saying it with flowers and gobs of goo, and tells what pleasure he has and what an honor it is to introduce Mr. Peter Parker, the son of Mrs. Eugenia Parker, the blah to whose blah-blah we owe the blah-blah-BLAH—‘Ladies and Gentlemen—Mr. Peter Parker!’
“Well, of course there’s a big hand, and Peter Piper rises wearily, and waits till the noise dies away, and then he lifts his glass of lukewarm lemonade and looks at it more in sorrow than in anger, and up on the balls of his feet, like young Mr. Mercury, all set for a get-a-way, and sighs a little, and says—‘Here’s to the mothers who bore us ... and still do!’”
CHAPTER XI
Glen sets the day for her twentieth birthday, and grieves because her suitor is too busy to help her better conditions, while Mr. ’Gene Carey is crushed by the perfidy of Old Ben.
GLEN would have been very lonely in the months which followed if it had not been for her increased activities with the mill workers, and her joy in her transformed house, for she saw less and less of Luke Manders.
She had to fight a feeling of disappointment which bordered sometimes on resentment: Luke’s advancement, instead of knitting them more closely together, seemed rather to come between them and force them apart. He was so absorbedly, relentlessly busy! Glen, unhappy over the way in which he drove the hands, had to admit that he drove himself most cruelly of all, and the hardest thing she had to bear was her helplessness to help him. She was bewildered by the fact that her duties, in spite of the tremendous pressure under which the mill was being run, were lighter than ever before. She longed ardently to lift burdens from him, but he constantly assumed more and more of the work which she had been in the habit of doing—even taking over the bulk of the correspondence, and taking full charge of certain of the files. When she protested he was adamant; he had to keep the reins in his own hands; he was so pushed he hardly knew whether he was on “foot or horseback,” and it confused him if he didn’t keep his eye on all the details.
And when she put a hand on his sleeve and said earnestly—“But Luke, I want to help you!” he had an instantaneous transition to the Luke of the lane on her birthday.
“You know how you can help me!” He was almost savage in voice and eyes, in the embrace in which he caught her. “You can help me if you want to—by marrying me! By keeping your promise to your father!”
She was frightened by his vehemence, and still more by her own reaction to it. She took herself firmly in hand; she would not fail him and her father because she was that curious and unfortunate creature, the person who doesn’t like to be touched. “But I will marry you, Luke! I will!”