al business. And father's treated me from the word
'go' like a hired man and nothin' else. He's bought and sold without
openin' his head to me. I wonder I've grown up at all. I wonder I ain't
in tyers, makin' mud-pies. If 'twa'n't for you and Annie, I shouldn't
think I was any kind of a man."

His angry passion was terribly appealing to her. It made her heart ache,
and she had much ado to keep from taking him to her arms, big as he was,
and comforting him, as she used to, years ago, when he came in with
frostbitten fingers or the dire array of cuts and bruises. But she
judged it best, in the interest of domestic government, to quell emotion
that could have, she knew, no hopeful issue, and she began breaking eggs
into her mixing bowl and then beating them with a brisk hand.

"Father never was one to talk over his business with anybody, even the
nearest," she rejoined. "You know that, Hermie. We've got to take folks
as we find 'em. Now you go ahead down to the long lot. He'll be
wonderin' where you be."

Herman strode away, after one incredulous look at her, a shaft she felt
through her downcast lids. It demanded whether father and mother had
equally forsaken him, and gave her a quick, sharp pang, and a blinding
flash of tears. But she went on mixing cake, and battling arguments as
she worked, and when her tin was in the oven, washed her baking dishes
methodically and then sat down by the window to read the weekly paper.
But as she read, she glanced up, now and then, at the familiar walls of
her kitchen, and through the window at the trees just shimmering into
green and the skyey intervals over them. This was the pictured landscape
she had worked on, framed by these wide, low windows, for all the years
she had lived here, doing her wifely duties soberly, and her motherly
ones with a hidden and ecstatic buoyancy.

The house, the bit of the world it gave upon, seemed a part of her life,
the containing husk of all the fruitage born to her. It was incredible
that she was to give it up and undertake not only a heavier load of work
but a new scene for it, at a time when she longed to fold her hands and
sit musing while young things filled the picture with beautiful dancing
motions, and the loves and fears she remembered as a part of the warm
reality of it, but not now so intimately her own. It was as if the
heaped-up basket of earthly fruits had passed her by, to be given into
other hands; but she had eaten and was content,