He puffed strongly at his cigar, and the momentary glow touched into relief his cheekbones and temples, lighted his eyes with a glimmer of their old eagerness. They were Margaret’s eyes! The same pointed fold of eyelids, the same dark fire. What had he said? A picture, walking off the canvas—

“I wonder why I said picture,” he went on slowly, out of the darkness. “I must have been thinking of that career you might have taken. You chose children instead, and human beings aren’t so docile as paint and canvas, are they?”

“Why discuss that?” Anne moved impatiently. “You must admit that I have no interests, no concern, except the good of the children. That’s why I won’t consent to this plan. You’ve been wheedled into it by a strange woman and a child! I—I think it rather unjust of you to encourage Margaret without consulting me.”

“Don’t be hasty, Anne. There are so many things I’d like to say tonight.” He flicked his cigar end over the railing. “You’ve no idea how much thinking I have done this week. It began after Miss Innsmere’s call. Then young Carsdale came in. Remember him? That boy at the university? He has carried through several of the things we started—and more of his own. He was telling me about them. When he left, he grinned at me and said, ‘They’ve got you properly domesticated and successful, haven’t they, Duffy?’ He was a little shabby in that gilt-edged office where I sit all day.”

Anne caught her breath sharply.

“You are suggesting, I suppose, that I am to blame for your—commercialization?” she asked, incredulity in her cool tone.

“I want to show you how I feel about Margie. I know why she is afraid to come to you with her desires. You are indomitable, Anne. You are like the earth itself. No one sees its motion, but no one can stop it and everyone is whirled along with it. Sometimes I have known that you chose me—shall we say to father your children for you? Sometimes I have pretended I was a free agent. Sometimes I have been sorry you didn’t devour me utterly—the female spider has a neat way with her spouse, you know! I shouldn’t say these things now, when it is all too late, except for Margaret. She doesn’t want to be eaten. The boys are still too young to mind.”

“How can you sit there and say those things!” Anne’s voice was thick with whirling rage. “As though I were a monster—”

“Anne, dear, you insist upon misunderstanding me. You have been a very beautiful mother. That I know. I am not blaming you that I am prosperous and respectable instead of lean and hollow-eyed from wrestling with ideas and schemes. There was at least a motive there. The children did need food and shelter. But Margaret is no longer a baby. She must have what she wants.”

Something snapped in Anne, and a terrible grinding pain, a physical anguish seized her. She huddled back in her chair, her hands pressing against her breasts.

“Oh, you can’t know!” she cried. “You think I am selfish, devouring! You can’t know! Before she was born I dreamed of her—beauty and health and loveliness. And since she was a baby I have watched her, worked to make her what she is. A dancer—in public—You have tried to get her away from me! You have tried—”

“Anne! You know that is a lie! I have been humble enough that she has cared for me. When I saw her dancing tonight I was jealous to frenzy that others might watch that. But if she wishes it, who are we to stand in her way?”

“She doesn’t know. She doesn’t need to dance—to do anything! I had planned so many things for years to come. Surely if I have made her what she is, I have a right to decide what she shall be!”

“Made her?” Robert sat forward; Anne could see his shoulders hunched against the dim light through the window behind him. “We like to think that, don’t we? Instead—I was a tool for you, and you, even you, Anne, were a tool for—what? An obscure drive of peoples behind us, craving embodiment. What have you made about her? When she was born you felt you had created her. What had you done, but wait, wait, while she grew?” He was silent. On the shore below them Anne heard the steady rhythm of the surf, like a great crowd shouting in the distance.

What had she done but wait? But wait? The words slipped into the rhythm of the surf.

“You know—” Robert’s voice dropped into a puzzled wonder. “That’s what all creative work seems to amount to. You wait. You think you are making something, but you only wait while it grows.” Another silence. “I have filled my days so full I had no time for that slow waiting. Do you see, Anne? We are nothing but the soil—lying fallow under the sun.”

Anne sat very still. The dreadful rending within her had ceased, and a heavy, lethargic cessation of pain, like that after childbirth, brooded over her. Incredibly there hung about her a moment of white peace, like that of her old dream, in which she lay in the great windless meadow curving against the sky, part of the waiting soil.

Robert had spoken the truth. Margaret’s struggles had been only an inarticulate expression of the same truth. It had been as though the soil tried to drag under its warm darkness a flower, opening above.

Robert rose and stood near her.

“That’s all, Anne.” She felt his fingers brush her shoulder. “After all, you are an artist. Perhaps you should have chosen otherwise than children for your work.”

Anne could not speak. Humility, a strange garment for her, enclosed her.

“It is late. Perhaps tomorrow—after you have slept on it.” He pulled his tone back to an ordinary level. “You are cold?” She had shivered under his fingers.

“No. Only stripped.” Her laugh trembled into a sob.

“Won’t you come in, now?”

“Not yet, please.” A moment of hesitating silence, and Robert moved toward the door. “Robert—” Anne found words with cumbersome difficulty. “It may be—that tomorrow I can thank you.” She saw him draw his body erect, as though a weight had dropped from him. “Goodnight.”

She sat for a long time, like one who accustoms himself to the thin, clear air of a mountain top. She had reached the plateau from which she could see the winding of the path she had followed. When, at last, she climbed silently to her room, she slept with the exhaustion which follows bodily suffering.

She woke early, lying for a time with her eyes closed. Then she rose, and with a curious feeling of exaltation, as though she prepared herself for a sacrament, she wound her long braids of dark hair about her head and bathed. She could hear Jamie and little Rob, their tongues clattering in small boy early morning style, but no one else seemed awake. She dressed carefully, choosing a dull blue crepe morning gown that Margaret had always liked. Then she went to Margaret’s door, and knocked. After a silent moment she pushed it ajar.

Margaret stirred sleepily, her face flushed and young in a cloud of dusky hair. At the sight of Anne she woke instantly, and the wistful alertness in her eyes wrenched at Anne’s poise.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands clasped, her eyes caressing the sweet curve of the child’s body beneath the cover.

“Margie, dear,” she said, “Father talked over with me your plans—” She saw terror leap in the girl’s eyes, but she kept her voice serene. “I shall be glad to have you study dancing. Will you, some day, show me some of your own dances?”

Margaret’s eyes widened, and a flame ran into her cheeks.

“Oh!” she cried. “Oh! I thought you wouldn’t like it—” She sat up against her pillow. “I must tell you—” a bewildered shame in her face—“that I burned up those letters yesterday. They—they were just about the dancing.”

“I am sorry about the letters.” Anne’s serenity had a tinge of piteousness. “Margaret, can you understand how hard it is to find your baby has grown up? I am sorry.”

Margaret brushed away the episode impetuously.

“You really mean that you are glad about the dancing?” Her slim hand moved shyly along the blanket toward her mother. “You are glad?”

The reticent caress winged into Anne’s heart.

“Yes,” she said steadily. “I wanted to tell you, to begin your day!”

She stood for an instant beside the bed, before she turned to leave. In that instant she had her vision of further waiting; a waiting into which Margaret might, some day, return.

Transcriber’s Notes

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

The original spelling and punctuation were preserved. Minor typesetting mistakes were silently corrected.