d been the pain it
had given her when she first began to put up her hair, to do it higher.

She was watching the bright little bonneted heads go by with the same
detachment that he had learned to look at the shop windows, without
thinking of appropriating any of their splendour for himself, and when
she spoke again it was without any sensible connection with the present
occasion.

"Peter, do you remember Willy Shakeley?"

"Shakey Willy, we used to call him. I remember his freckles; they were
the biggest thing about him." He waited for the communicating thread,
but nothing came except what presently reached him out of his own young
recollections. "He wasn't good enough for you, Ellen," he said at last
for all comment.

"He was kind, and he wouldn't have minded about my being lame, but a man
has to have a healthy wife if he's a farmer." How completely she had
accepted the deprivation for herself, he saw by her not wasting a sigh
over it; she had schooled herself so long to go no further in her
thought than she went on the crutch which tapped now on the pavement
beside him. As if to stop his going any further on her account she
smiled up at him. "Peter, if you were to meet any of the things you
thought you'd grow up to be, do you suppose you'd know them?"

At least he could have told her that he didn't meet any of them on his
way between Siegel Brothers and the flat in Pleasanton.

There are many things which if a young man goes without until he is
twenty-five he can very well do without, but the one thing he cannot
leave off without hurting him is the expectation of some time doing
them. The obligation of the mortgage and Ellen's lameness had been a
sort of bridge for Peter, a high airy structure which engaged the best
of him and so carried him safely over Blodgett's without once letting
him fall into the unlovely vein of life there, its narrowness, its
commonness. He had known, even when he had known it most inaccessible,
that there was another life which answered to every instinct of his for
beauty and fitness. He waited only for the release from strain for his
entry with it. Now by the shock of his mother's death he found himself
precipitated in a frame of living where a parlour set out of Siegel
Brothers' Household Emporium was the limit of taste and understanding.
The worst thing about Siegel Brothers' parlour sets was that he sold
them. He knew it was his particular value to Siegel Brothers that he had
always