“I forgot them, David,” he said guiltily.
“Jim Wheeler went out to look them up, and
I—I’ll go back after dinner.”
It was sometime later in the meal that Dick looked
up from his plate and said:
“I’d like to cut office hours on Wednesday
night, David. I’ve asked Elizabeth Wheeler
to go into town to the theater.”
“What about the baby at the Homer place?”
“Not due until Sunday. I’ll leave
my seat number at the box office, anyhow.”
“What are you going to see, Dick?” Mrs.
Crosby asked. “Will you have some dumplings?”
“I will, but David shouldn’t. Too
much starch. Why, it’s ’The Valley,’
I think. An actress named Carlysle, Beverly Carlysle,
is starring in it.”
He ate on, his mind not on his food, but back in the
white house on Palmer Lane, and a girl. Lucy
Crosby, fork in air, stared at him, and then glanced
at David.
But David did not look up from his plate.
The Wheeler house was good, modern and commonplace.
Walter Wheeler and his wife were like the house.
Just as here and there among the furniture there
was a fine thing, an antique highboy, a Sheraton sideboard
or some old cut glass, so they had, with a certain
mediocrity their own outstanding virtues. They
liked music, believed in the home as the unit of the
nation, put happiness before undue ambition, and had
devoted their lives to their children.
For many years their lives had centered about the
children. For years they had held anxious conclave
about whooping cough, about small early disobediences,
later about Sunday tennis. They stood united
to protect the children against disease, trouble and
eternity.
Now that the children were no longer children, they
were sometimes lonely and still apprehensive.
They feared motor car accidents, and Walter Wheeler
had withstood the appeals of Jim for a half dozen
years. They feared trains for them, and journeys,
and unhappy marriages, and hid their fears from each
other. Their nightly prayers were “to
keep them safe and happy.”
But they saw life reaching out and taking them, one
by one. They saw them still as children, but
as children determined to bear their own burdens.
Jim stayed out late sometimes, and considered his
manhood in question if interrogated. Nina was
married and out of the home, but there loomed before
them the possibility of maternity and its dangers
for her. There remained only Elizabeth, and on
her they lavished the care formerly divided among
the three.
It was their intention and determination that she
should never know trouble. She was tenderer
than the others, more docile and gentle. They
saw her, not as a healthy, normal girl, but as something
fragile and very precious.
Nina was different. They had always worried
a little about Nina, although they had never put their
anxiety to each other. Nina had always overrun
her dress allowance, although she had never failed
to be sweetly penitent about it, and Nina had always
placed an undue emphasis on things. Her bedroom
before her marriage was cluttered with odds and ends,
cotillion favors and photographs, college pennants
and small unwise purchases—trophies of the
gayety and conquest which were her life.
