“Stealing—”
“Rats! What’s stealing! You’re always making fun of these preachers that talk about Sin and Truth and Honesty and all those words that’ve been used so much they don’t mean a darn’ thing and— I don’t care! Daws Hunziker, the old man’s son, he told me his dad said you could be a millionaire, and then you keep us strapped like this, and Mom sick— Let me tell you, back in Mohalis Mom used to slip me a couple of dollars almost every week and— I’m tired of it! If you’re going to keep me in rags, I’m going to cut out college!”
Gottlieb stormed, but there was no force in it. He did not know, all the next fortnight, what his son was going to do, what himself was going to do.
Then, so quietly that not till they had returned from the cemetery did they realize her passing, his wife died, and the next week his oldest daughter ran off with a worthless laughing fellow who lived by gambling.
Gottlieb sat alone. Over and over he read the Book of Job. “Truly the Lord hath smitten me and my house,” he whispered. When Robert came in, mumbling that he would be good, the old man lifted to him a blind face, unhearing. But as he repeated the fables of his fathers it did not occur to him to believe them, or to stoop in fear before their God of Wrath—or to gain ease by permitting Hunziker to defile his discovery.
He arose, in time, and went silently to his laboratory. His experiments were as careful as ever, and his assistants saw no change save that he did not lunch in hall. He walked blocks away, to a vile restaurant at which he could save thirty cents a day.
V
Out of the dimness which obscured the people about him, Miriam emerged.
She was eighteen, the youngest of his brood, squat, and in no way comely save for her tender mouth. She had always been proud of her father, understanding the mysterious and unreasoning compulsions of his science, but she had been in awe till now, when he walked heavily and spoke rarely. She dropped her piano lessons, discharged the maid, studied the cook-book, and prepared for him the fat crisp dishes that he loved. Her regret was that she had never learned German, for he dropped now and then into the speech of his boyhood.
He eyed her, and at length: “So! One is with me. Could you endure the poverty if I went away—to teach chemistry in a high school?”