“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.

III

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.