“How old are you?” he inquired.

“Thirty-six.”

“Your mother was thirty-nine,” he replied.  And at that Edith turned and stared at him, bewildered, shocked, brought face to face with a new and momentous fact in her life.

“Mother only my age when she died?”

“Yes,” said Roger gently, “only three years older.”  With a twinge of pain he noticed two quite visible streaks of gray in his daughter’s soft blonde hair.  “And she felt as you do now—­as though she were just starting out.  And I felt the same way, my dear.  If I’m not mistaken, everyone does.  You still feel young—­but the new generation is already growing up—­and you can feel yourself being pushed on.  And it is hard—­it is very hard.”  Clumsily he took her hand.  “Don’t let yourself drop out,” he said.  “Be as your mother would have been if she had been left instead of me.  Go straight on with your children.”

To this note he could feel her respond.  And at first, as he felt what a fight she was making, Roger glorified her pluck.  As he watched her with her children at table, smiling at their talk with an evident effort to enter in, and again with her baby snug in her lap while she read bedtime stories to Bob and little Tad at her side, he kept noticing the resemblance between his daughter and his wife.  How close were these two members of his family drawing together now, one of them living, the other dead.

But later, as the weeks wore on, she began to plan for her children.  She planned precisely how to fit them all into the house in town, she planned the hours for their meals, for their going alone or with the nurse or a maid to their different private schools, to music lessons, to dancing school and uptown to the park to play.  She planned their fall clothes and she planned their friends.  And there came to her father occasional moods of anxiety.  He remembered Bruce’s grim remarks about those “simple” schools and clothes, the kind that always cost the most.  And he began to realize what Bruce’s existence must have been.  For scarcely ever in their talks did Edith speak of anything outside of her family.  Night after night, with a tensity born of her struggle with her grief, she talked about her children.  And Roger was in Bruce’s place, he was the one she planned with.  At moments with a vague dismay he glimpsed the life ahead in his home.

George was hard at work each day down by the broken dam at the mill.  He had an idea he could patch it up, put the old water-wheel back into place and make it run a dynamo, by which he could light the house and barn and run the machines in the dairy.  In his new role as the man of his family, George was planning out his career.  He was wrestling with a book entitled “Our New Mother Earth” and a journal called “The Modern Farm.”  And to Roger he confided that he meant to be a farmer.  He wanted to go in the autumn to the State Agricultural College.  But when one day, very cautiously, Roger spoke to Edith of this, with a hard and jealous smile which quite transformed her features, she said,