“But what makes it sad for you?”
“I don’t know,” she said, in a lighter
tone. “Perhaps it’s a kind of useless
foreboding I seem to have pretty often. It may
be that—or it may be poor papa.”
“You are a funny, delightful girl, though!”
Russell laughed. “When your father’s
so well again that he goes out walking in the evenings!”
“He does too much walking,” Alice said.
“Too much altogether, over at his new plant.
But there isn’t any stopping him.”
She laughed and shook her head. “When
a man gets an ambition to be a multi-millionaire his
family don’t appear to have much weight with
him. He’ll walk all he wants to, in spite
of them.”
“I suppose so,” Russell said, absently;
then he leaned forward. “I wish I could
understand better why you were ‘sadly’
happy.”
Meanwhile, as Alice shed what further light she could
on this point, the man ambitious to be a “multi-millionaire”
was indeed walking too much for his own good.
He had gone to bed, hoping to sleep well and rise
early for a long day’s work, but he could not
rest, and now, in his nightgown and slippers, he was
pacing the floor of his room.
“I wish I did know,” he thought,
over and over. “I do wish I knew
how he feels about it.”
That was a thought almost continuously in his mind,
even when he was hardest at work; and, as the days
went on and he could not free himself, he became querulous
about it. “I guess I’m the biggest
dang fool alive,” he told his wife as they sat
together one evening. “I got plenty else
to bother me, without worrying my head off about what
he thinks. I can’t help what he thinks;
it’s too late for that. So why should I
keep pestering myself about it?”
“It’ll wear off, Virgil,” Mrs. Adams
said, reassuringly. She was gentle and sympathetic
with him, and for the first time in many years he
would come to sit with her and talk, when he had finished
his day’s work. He had told her, evading
her eye, “Oh, I don’t blame you.
You didn’t get after me to do this on your
own account; you couldn’t help it.”
“Yes; but it don’t wear off,” he
complained. “This afternoon I was showing
the men how I wanted my vats to go, and I caught my
fool self standing there saying to my fool self, ’It’s
funny I don’t hear how he feels about it from
SOMEbody.’ I was saying it aloud, almost—and
it is funny I don’t hear anything!”
“Well, you see what it means, don’t you,
Virgil? It only means he hasn’t said anything
to anybody about it. Don’t you think you’re
getting kind of morbid over it?”
“Maybe, maybe,” he muttered.
“Why, yes,” she said, briskly. “You
don’t realize what a little bit of a thing all
this is to him. It’s been a long, long
while since the last time you even mentioned glue
to him, and he’s probably forgotten everything
about it.”
