Uncle Tom laughed. “You needn’t tell me you’re not proud of it,” he declared.
“And I have given her,” she continued, “a taste for dress.”
“I think, my dear,” said her husband, “that there were others who contributed to that.”
“It was my own vanity. I should have combated the tendency in her,” said Aunt Mary.
“If you had dressed Honora in calico, you could not have changed her,” replied Uncle Tom, with conviction.
In the meantime Honora and Peter had mounted the electric car, and were speeding westward. They had a seat to themselves, the very first one on the “grip”—that survival of the days of cable cars. Honora’s eyes brightened as she held on to her hat, and the stray wisps of hair about her neck stirred in the breeze.
“Oh, I wish we would never stop, until we came to the Pacific Ocean!” she exclaimed.
“Would you be content to stop then?” he asked. He had a trick of looking downward with a quizzical expression in his dark grey eyes.
“No,” said Honora. “I should want to go on and see everything in the world worth seeing. Sometimes I feel positively as though I should die if I had to stay here in St. Louis.”
“You probably would die—eventually,” said Peter.
Honora was justifiably irritated.
“I could shake you, Peter!”
He laughed.
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t do any good,” he answered.
“If I were a man,” she proclaimed, “I shouldn’t stay here. I’d go to New York—I’d be somebody—I’d make a national reputation for myself.”
“I believe you would,” said Peter sadly, but with a glance of admiration.
“That’s the worst of being a woman—we have to sit still until something happens to us.”
“What would you like to happen?” he asked, curiously. And there was a note in his voice which she, intent upon her thoughts, did not remark.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said; “anything—anything to get out of this rut and be something in the world. It’s dreadful to feel that one has power and not be able to use it.”
The car stopped at the terminal. Thanks to the early hour of Aunt Mary’s dinner, the western sky was still aglow with the sunset over the forests as they walked past the closed grille of the Dwyer mansion into the park. Children rolled on the grass, while mothers and fathers, tired out from the heat and labour of a city day, sat on the benches. Peter stooped down and lifted a small boy, painfully thin, who had fallen, weeping, on the gravel walk. He took his handkerchief and wiped the scratch on the child’s forehead.
“There, there!” he said, smiling, “it’s all right now. We must expect a few tumbles.”
The child looked at him, and suddenly smiled through his tears.
The father appeared, a red-headed Irishman.
“Thank you, Mr. Erwin; I’m sure it’s very kind of you, sir, to bother with him,” he said gratefully. “It’s that thin he is with the heat, I take him out for a bit of country air.”