can't father them all, you know."

"I don't want you to father them all," said Susan; "and there isn't
anybody like Jimmy! You'll see."

It came over me as she spoke that I was, however unwillingly,
predestined to see.

Maltby Phar thought otherwise. That night, after Susan had gone up to
bed, I talked the thing over with him--trying for an airy, detached
tone; the tone of one who discusses an indifferent matter for want of a
more urgent. Maltby was not, I fear, deceived.

"My dear Boz," he pleaded, "buck up! Get a fresh grip on your
individuality and haul it back from the brink of destruction! If you
don't, that little she-demon above-stairs will push it over into the
gulf, once for all! You'll be nobody. You'll be her dupe--her slave. How
can you smile, man! I'm quite serious, and I warn you. Fight the good
fight! Defend the supreme rights of your ego, before it's too late!"

"Why these tragic accents?" I parried. "It's not likely the washlady's
kid would want to come; or his mother let him. Susan idealizes him, of
course. He's probably quite commonplace and content as he is. No harm,
though, if it pleases Susan, in looking him over?"

Maltby took up his book again. He dismissed me. "Whom the gods
destroy----" he muttered, and ostentatiously turned a page.

VII

My feeling that I was predestined to see, with Susan, that there wasn't
anybody like Jimmy--that I was further predestined to take him into my
heart and home--proved, very much to my own surprise and to the
disappointment of Susan, to be unjustified. This was the first bitter
defeat that Susan had been called upon to bear since leaving Birch
Street. She took it quietly, but deeply, which troubled my private sense
of relief, and indeed turned it into something very like regret. The
simple fact was that much had happened in Birch Street since the tragedy
of the four-room house; life had not stood still there; chance and
change--deaths and marriages and births--had altered the circumstances
of whole families. In short, that steady flux of mortality, which
respects neither the dignity of the Hillhouse Avenues nor the obscurity
of the Birch Streets of the world, had in its secret courses already
borne Jimmy Kane--elsewhere. Precisely where, even his mother did not
know; and first and last it was her entire and passionate ignorance as
to Jimmy's present location which foiled us. "West" is a geographical
expression certainly, but it is not an address.