ted away four long years
while James Holden grew from six to ten years old, hiding under the guise
of the Hermit of Martin's Hill and behind the pleasant adult facade of
Mrs. Janet Bagley.

CHAPTER TWELVE

If Paul Brennan found himself blocked in his efforts to find James Holden
and the re-created Holden Educator, James himself was annoyed by one
evident fact: Everything he did resulted in spreading the news of the
machine itself.

Had he been eighteen or so, he might have made out to his own taste. In
the days of late teen-age, a youth can hold a job and rent a room, buy
his own clothing and conduct himself to the limit of his ability. At ten
he is suspect, because no one will permit him to paddle his own canoe. At
a later age James could have rented a small apartment and built his
machine alone. But starting as young as he did, he was forced to hide
behind the cover of some adult, and he had picked Mrs. Bagley because he
could control her both through her desire for security and the promise of
a fine education for the daughter Martha Bagley.

The daughter was a two-way necessity; she provided him with a
contemporary companion and also gave him a lever to wield against the
adult. A lone woman could have made her way without trouble. A lone woman
with a girl-child is up against a rather horrifying problem of providing
both support and parental care. He felt that he had done what he had to
do, up to the point where Mrs. Bagley became involved with Tim Fisher or
anybody else. This part of adulthood was not yet within his grasp.

But there it was and here it is, and now there was Martha to complicate
the picture. Had Mrs. Bagley been alone, she and Tim could go off and
marry and then settle down in Timbuctoo if they wanted to. But not with
Martha. She was in the same intellectual kettle of sardines as James. Her
taste in education was by no means the same. She took to the mathematical
subjects indifferently, absorbing them well enough--once she could be
talked into spending the couple of hours that each day demanded--but
without interest. Martha could rattle off quotations from literary
masters, she could follow the score of most operas (her voice was a bit
off-key but she knew what was going on) and she enjoyed all of the
available information on keeping a house in order. Her eye and her mind
were, as James Holden's, faster than her hand. She went through the same
frustrations as he did, with different tools