Part 6

“What about the baby at the Homer place?”

“Not due until Sunday. I'll leave my seat number at the box office, anyhow.”

“What are you going to see, Dick?” Mrs. Crosby asked. “Will you have some dumplings?”

“I will, but David shouldn't. Too much starch. Why, it's 'The Valley,' I think. An actress named Carlysle, Beverly Carlysle, is starring in it.”

He ate on, his mind not on his food, but back in the white house on Palmer Lane, and a girl. Lucy Crosby, fork in air, stared at him, and then glanced at David.

But David did not look up from his plate.

III

The Wheeler house was good, modern and commonplace. Walter Wheeler and his wife were like the house. Just as here and there among the furniture there was a fine thing, an antique highboy, a Sheraton sideboard or some old cut glass, so they had, with a certain mediocrity their own outstanding virtues. They liked music, believed in the home as the unit of the nation, put happiness before undue ambition, and had devoted their lives to their children.

For many years their lives had centered about the children. For years they had held anxious conclave about whooping cough, about small early disobediences, later about Sunday tennis. They stood united to protect the children against disease, trouble and eternity.

Now that the children were no longer children, they were sometimes lonely and still apprehensive. They feared motor car accidents, and Walter Wheeler had withstood the appeals of Jim for a half dozen years. They feared trains for them, and journeys, and unhappy marriages, and hid their fears from each other. Their nightly prayers were “to keep them safe and happy.”

But they saw life reaching out and taking them, one by one. They saw them still as children, but as children determined to bear their own burdens. Jim stayed out late sometimes, and considered his manhood in question if interrogated. Nina was married and out of the home, but there loomed before them the possibility of maternity and its dangers for her. There remained only Elizabeth, and on her they lavished the care formerly divided among the three.

It was their intention and determination that she should never know trouble. She was tenderer than the others, more docile and gentle. They saw her, not as a healthy, normal girl, but as something fragile and very precious.

Nina was different. They had always worried a little about Nina, although they had never put their anxiety to each other. Nina had always overrun her dress allowance, although she had never failed to be sweetly penitent about it, and Nina had always placed an undue emphasis on things. Her bedroom before her marriage was cluttered with odds and ends, cotillion favors and photographs, college pennants and small unwise purchases--trophies of the gayety and conquest which were her life.

And Nina had “come out.” It had cost a great deal, and it was not so much to introduce her to society as to put a family recognition on a fact already accomplished, for Nina had brought herself out unofficially at sixteen. There had been the club ballroom, and a great many flowers which withered before they could be got to the hospital; and new clothing for all the family, and a caterer and orchestra. After that, for a cold and tumultuous winter Mrs. Wheeler had sat up with the dowagers night after night until all hours, and the next morning had let Nina sleep, while she went about her household duties. She had aged, rather, and her determined smile had grown a little fixed.

She was a good woman, and she wanted her children's happiness more than anything in the world, but she had a faint and sternly repressed feeling of relief when Nina announced her engagement. Nina did it with characteristic sangfroid, at dinner one night.

“Don't ring for Annie for a minute, mother,” she said. “I want to tell you all something. I'm going to marry Leslie Ward.”

There had been a momentary pause. Then her father said:

“Just a minute. Is that Will Ward's boy?”

“Yes. He's not a boy.”

“Well, he'll come around to see me before there's any engagement. Has that occurred to either of you?”

“Oh, he'll be around. He'd have come to-night, but Howard Moore is having his bachelor dinner. I hope he doesn't look shot to pieces to-morrow. These bachelor things--! We'd better have a dinner or something, mother, and announce it.”

There had been the dinner, with a silver loving cup bought for the occasion, and thereafter to sit out its useless days on the Sheraton sideboard. And there had been a trousseau and a wedding so expensive that a small frown of anxiety had developed between Walter Wheeler's eyebrows and stayed there.

For Nina's passion for things was inherent, persisting after her marriage. She discounted her birthday and Christmases in advance, coming around to his office a couple of months before the winter holidays and needing something badly.

“It's like this, daddy,” she would say. “You're going to give me a check for Christmas anyhow, aren't you? And it would do me more good now. I simply can't go to another ball.”

“Where's your trousseau?”

“It's worn out-danced to rags. And out of date, too.”

“I don't understand it, Nina. You and Leslie have a good income. Your mother and I--”

“You didn't have any social demands. And wedding presents! If one more friend of mine is married--”