“I wonder what’s keeping Bruce,” she said.  Bruce was still in his office downtown.  As a rule on Friday evenings he came with his wife to supper here, but this week he had some new business on hand.  Edith was vague about it.  As she tried to explain she knitted her brows and said that Bruce was working too hard.  And her father grunted assent.

“Bruce ought to knock off every summer,” he said, “for a good solid month, or better two.  Can’t you bring him up to the mountains this year?” He referred to the old New Hampshire home which he had kept as a summer place.  But Edith smiled at the idea.

“Yes, I could bring him,” she replied, “and in a week he’d be perfectly crazy to get back to his office again.”  She compressed her lips.  “I know what he needs—­and we’ll do it some day, in spite of him.”

“A suburb, eh,” her father said, and his face took on a look of dislike.  They had often talked of suburbs.

“Yes,” his daughter answered, “I’ve picked out the very house.”  He threw at her a glance of impatience.  He knew what had started her on this line.  Edith’s friend, Madge Deering, was living out in Morristown.  All very well, he reflected, but her case was not at all the same.  He had known Madge pretty well.  Although the death of her husband had left her a widow at twenty-nine, with four small daughters to bring up, she had gone on determinedly.  Naturally smart and able, Madge was always running to town, keeping up with all her friends and with every new fad and movement there, although she made fun of most of them.  Twice she had taken her girls abroad.  But Edith was quite different.  In a suburb she would draw into her house and never grow another inch.  And Bruce, poor devil, would commute and take work home from the office.  But Roger couldn’t tell her that.

“I’d be sorry to see you do it,” he said.  “I’d miss you up in the mountains.”

“Oh, we’d come up in the summer,” she answered.  “I wouldn’t miss the mountains for worlds!”

Then they talked of summer plans.  And soon again Edith’s smooth pretty brows were wrinkling absorbedly.  It was hard in her planning not to be sure whether her new baby would come in May or early June.  It was only the first of April now.  While she talked her father watched her.  He liked her quiet fearlessness in facing the ordeal ahead.  Into the bewildering city he felt her searching anxiously to find good things for her small brood, to make every dollar count, to keep their little bodies strong, to guard their hungry little souls from many things she thought were bad.  Of all his daughters, he told himself, she was the one most like his wife.

While she was talking Bruce came in.  Of medium height and a wiry build, his quick kindly smile of greeting did not conceal the fine tight lines about his mouth and between his eyes.  His small trim moustache was black, but his hair already showed streaks of gray although he was not quite thirty-eight, and as he lit a cigarette his right hand twitched perceptibly.