Their lighted-up eyes met, and suddenly he leaned down and touched her cheek—a swift caress. “You’re a little bit of all right, Janey,” which was great praise from Baldy.
CHAPTER VI
“STAY IN THE FIELD, OH, WARRIOR!”
Mrs. Follette had been born in Maryland with a tradition of aristocratic blood. It was this tradition which had upheld her through years of poverty after the Civil War. A close scanning of the family tree might have disclosed ancestors who had worked with their hands. But these, Mrs. Follette’s family had chosen to ignore in favor of one grandfather who had held Colonial office, and who had since been magnified into a personage.
On such slight foundation, Mrs. Follette had erected high towers of social importance. As a wife of a government clerk, her income was limited, but she lived on a farm, back of Sherwood Park, which she had inherited from her father. The farm was called Castle Manor, which dignified it in the eyes of the county. Mrs. Follette’s friends were among the old families who had occupied the land for many generations. She would have nothing to do with the people of Sherwood Park. She held that all suburbs are negligible socially. People came to them from anywhere and went from them to be swallowed up in obscurity. There was no stability. She made an exception, only, of the Baldwin Barneses. There was good Maryland blood back of them, and more than that, a Virginia Governor. To be sure they did not care for these things; old Baldwin’s democracy had been almost appalling. But they were, none the less, worth while.
Mr. Follette, during his lifetime, had walked a mile each morning to take the train at Sherwood Park, and had walked back a mile each night, until at last he had tired of two peripatetic miles a day, and of eight hours at his desk, and of eternally putting on his dinner coat when there was no one to see, and like old Baldwin Barnes, he had laid him down with a will.
At his death all income stopped, and Mrs. Follette had found herself on a somewhat lonely peak of exclusiveness. She could not afford to go with her richer neighbors, and she refused to consider Sherwood seriously. Now and then, however, she accepted invitations from old friends, and in return offered such simple hospitality as she could afford without self-consciousness. She might be a snob, but she was, to those whom she permitted to cross her threshold, an incomparable hostess. She gave what she had without apology.
She had, too, a sort of admirable courage. Her ambitions had been wrapped up in her son. What her father might have been, Evans was to be. They had scrimped and saved that he might go to college and study law. Then, at that first dreadful cry from across the seas, he had gone. There had been long months of fighting. He had left her in the flower of his youth, a wonder-lad, with none to match him among his friends. He had come back crushed and broken. He, whose career lay so close to his heart—could do now no sustained work. Mentally and physically he must rest. He might be years in getting back. He would never get back to gay and gallant boyhood. That was gone forever.
Yet if Mrs. Follette’s heart had failed her at times, she had never shown it. She was making the farm pay for itself. She supplied the people of Sherwood Park and surrounding estates with milk. But she never was in any sense—a milkwoman. It was, rather, as if in selling her milk she distributed favors. It was on this income that she subsisted, she and her son.