Mr. Chester and Mr. Heath were delighted; though Mr. Chester said that he had an engagement for the evening. (“What engagement except with the cutting-women?” thought Mattie Tiffany.) But Eleanor declined. Some of the chickens were sick; she was afraid that it might be the pip; she doubted if Antonio or Maria would attend to it; she would sup at home. Mrs. Tiffany, anticipating the intention which she saw in Bertram’s eyes, made a quick draft on her tact and asked:
“Mr. Chester, would you mind helping me in with the chairs?”
Seated at the supper table, Bertram Chester expanded. The Judge took him in hand at once; led him on into twenty channels of introspective talk. Presently, they were speaking 37 direct to one another, the gulf that separates youth from age, employer from employed, bridged by interest on one side and supreme confidence on the other. This grouping left Mrs. Tiffany free to study Heath. It grew upon her that she had overlooked him and his needs through her interest in the more obvious Chester. She noticed with approval his finished table manners. Mr. Chester, though he understood the proper use of knife and fork and napkin, paid slight attention to “passing things”; Heath, on the contrary, was alert always, and especially to her needs. “He had a careful mother,” she thought. Gently, and with a concealed approach, she led him on to his family and his worldly circumstances. He spoke freely and simply, and with a curious frank assumption that anything his people chose to do was right, because they did it. He had come down to the University from Tacoma; his father kept a wagon repair shop. His people had gone too heavily into the land boom, and lost everything.
“I felt that I could work my way through Berkeley or Stanford more easily than through an Eastern college,” he said simply. 38
“And then I shouldn’t be so far away from home. Mother likes to see me at least once a year.”
He was going home after the apricot picking was over; he felt that in vacation he should earn at least his fare to Washington and back.
“I’m sure she must be a very good mother to deserve that devotion,” said Mrs. Tiffany, warming to him.
“She deserves more,” he said, a kind of inner glow rising to his white-and-pink boyish face. That same glow,—Mrs. Tiffany might have noticed this and did not—illuminated him whenever, from across the table, Chester’s laugh or his energetic crack on a sentence called a forced attention. Mr. Heath deferred always to this louder personality; kept for him the anxious and eager interest of a mother toward her young. Gradually, this interest absorbed both Mr. Heath and Mrs. Tiffany. The table talk became a series of monologues by young Bertram Chester, Judge Tiffany throwing in just enough replies to spur and guide him.
“No, I don’t belong to any fraternity,” said the confident youth, “don’t believe in them. 39 They plenty beat me for football captain last year too. When I came to college, they didn’t want me. After I made the team and got prominent, they began to rush me. Then I didn’t want them.”
“It might have been easier for Bert if he had joined them,” said Heath. “They don’t like to have their members working at—with their hands; they always find them snap jobs if they are poor and prominent.”