Enid was rather more indulgent with his father than with any one else, he noticed.  Mr. Wheeler stopped to see her almost every day, and even took her driving in his old buckboard.  Bayliss came out from town to spend the evening occasionally.  Enid’s vegetarian suppers suited him, and as she worked with him in the Prohibition campaign, they always had business to discuss.  Bayliss had a social as well as a hygienic prejudice against alcohol, and he hated it less for the harm it did than for the pleasure it gave.  Claude consistently refused to take any part in the activities of the Anti-Saloon League, or to distribute what Bayliss and Enid called “our literature.”

In the farming towns the term “literature” was applied only to a special kind of printed matter; there was Prohibition literature, Sex-Hygiene literature, and, during a scourge of cattle disease, there was Hoof-and-Mouth literature.  This special application of the word didn’t bother Claude, but his mother, being an old-fashioned school-teacher, complained about it.

Enid did not understand her husband’s indifference to a burning question, and could only attribute it to the influence of Ernest Havel.  She sometimes asked Claude to go with her to one of her committee meetings.  If it was a Sunday, he said he was tired and wanted to read the paper.  If it was a week-day, he had something to do at the barn, or meant to clear out the timber claim.  He did, indeed, saw off a few dead limbs, and cut down a tree the lightning had blasted.  Further than that he wouldn’t have let anybody clear the timber lot; he would have died defending it.

The timber claim was his refuge.  In the open, grassy spots, shut in by the bushy walls of yellowing ash trees, he felt unmarried and free; free to smoke as much as he liked, and to read and dream.  Some of his dreams would have frozen his young wife’s blood with horror—­and some would have melted his mother’s heart with pity.  To lie in the hot sun and look up at the stainless blue of the autumn sky, to hear the dry rustle of the leaves as they fell, and the sound of the bold squirrels leaping from branch to branch; to lie thus and let his imagination play with life—­that was the best he could do.  His thoughts, he told himself, were his own.  He was no longer a boy.  He went off into the timber claim to meet a young man more experienced and interesting than himself, who had not tied himself up with compromises.

IV

From her upstairs window Mrs. Wheeler could see Claude moving back and forth in the west field, drilling wheat.  She felt lonely for him.  He didn’t come home as often as he might.  She had begun to wonder whether he was one of those people who are always discontented; but whatever his disappointments were, he kept them locked in his own breast.  One had to learn the lessons of life.  Nevertheless, it made her a little sad to see him so settled and indifferent at twenty-three.