“Oh, you'll not complain of the time and thought I've put on it,” the boy broke in with a short, hard laugh. “But, you see, father—you see”—his armour had slipped from him—“it doesn't express—your views.”
“Did I ever say I wanted you to express 'my views'? Did I bring you up to be a mouthpiece of mine? Haven't I told you to think?” But with a long, sharp glance at his boy anger gave way. “Come, boy”—going over and patting him on the back—“brace up now. You're acting like a seven-year-old girl afraid to speak her first piece,” and his big laugh rang out, eager to reassure.
“You won't see it! You won't believe it! I don't suppose you'll believe it when you hear it!” He turned away, overwhelmed by a sudden realisation of just how difficult was the thing that lay before him.
The man started toward his son, but instead he walked over and sat down at the opposite side of the table, waiting. He was beginning to see that there was something in this which he did not understand.
At last the boy turned to him, fighting back some things, taking on other things. He gazed at the care-worn, rugged face—face of a worker and a dreamer, reading in those lines the story of that life, seeing more clearly than he had ever seen before the beauty and futility of it. Here was the idealist, the man who would give his whole lifetime to a dream he had dreamed. He loved his father very tenderly as he looked at him, read him, then.
“Father,” he asked quietly, “are you satisfied with your life?”
The man simply stared—waiting, seeking his bearings.
“You came to this country when you were nineteen years old—didn't you, father?” The man nodded. “And now you're—it's sixty-one, isn't it?”
Again he nodded.
“You've been in America, then, forty-two years. Father, do you think as much of it now as you did forty-two years ago?”