“I needed the trip to shake me down,” he pleaded, when Edith scolded him well for this terrific manner of starting his vacation.  “I had to have it to cut me off from the job I left behind me.  Now watch me settle down on this farm.”

But it appeared he could not settle down.  For the first few days, in his motor, he was busy exploring the mountains.  “We’ll make ’em look foolish.  Eh, son?” he said.  And with George, who mutely adored him, he ran all about them in a day.  Genially he gave everyone rides.  When he’d finished with the family, he took Dave Royce the farmer and his wife and children, and even both the hired men, for Bruce was an hospitable soul.  But more than anyone else he took George.  They spent hours working on the car, and at times when they came into the house begreased and blackened from their work, Edith reproved them like bad boys—­but Deborah smiled contentedly.

But at the end of another week Bruce grew plainly restless, and despite his wife’s remonstrances made ready to return to town.  When she spoke of his hay fever he bragged to her complacently of his newly discovered cure.

“Oh, bother your little blue bugs!” she cried.

“The bugs aren’t blue,” he explained to her, in a mild and patient voice that drove Edith nearly wild.  “They’re so little they have no color at all.  Poor friendly little devils—­”

“Bruce!” his wife exploded.

“They’ve been almighty good to me.  You ought to have heard my friend the Judge, the last night I was with him.  He patted his bottle and said to me, ’Bruce, my boy, with all these simple animals right here as our companions why be a damn fool and run off to the cows?’ And there’s a good deal in what he says.  You ought to be mighty thankful, too, that my summer pleasures are so mild.  If you could see what some chaps do—­”

And Bruce started back for the city.  George rode with him the first few miles, then left him and came trudging home.  His spirits were exceedingly low.

As August drew toward a close, Deborah, too, showed signs of unrest.  With ever growing frequency Roger felt her eagerness to return to her work in New York.

“You’re as bad as Bruce,” he growled at her.  “You don’t have to be back,” he argued.  “School doesn’t begin for nearly three weeks.”

“There’s the suffrage campaign,” she answered.  He gave her a look of exasperation.

“Now what the devil has suffrage to do with your schools?” he demanded.

“When the women get the vote, we’ll spend more money on the children.”

“Suppose the money isn’t there,” was Roger’s grim rejoinder.

“Then we’ll act like old-fashioned wives, I suppose,” his daughter answered cheerfully, “and keep nagging till it is there.  We’ll keep up such a nagging,” she added, in sweet even tones, “that you’ll get the money by hook or crook, to save yourselves from going insane.”

After this he caught her reading in the New York papers the list of campaign meetings each night, meetings in hot stifling halls or out upon deafening corners.  And as she read there came over her face a look like that of a man who has given up tobacco and suddenly sniffs it among his friends.  She went down the last night of August.