His Family | Page 4

still, each
groping for her happiness and each held back as he had been, either by
checks within herself or by the gay distractions of the absorbing city.
He saw each of his daughters, parts of himself. And he remembered
what Judith had said: "You will live on in our children's lives." And he
began to get glimmerings of a new immortality, made up of generations,
an endless succession of other lives extending into the future.
Some of all this he remembered now, in scattered fragments here and
there. Then from somewhere far away a great bell began booming the
hour, and it roused him from his revery. He had often heard the bell of
late. A calm deep-toned intruder, it had first struck in upon his attention
something over two years ago. Vaguely he had wondered about it.
Soon he had found it was on the top of a tower a little to the north, one
of the highest pinnacles of this tumultuous modern town. But the bell
was not tumultuous. And as he listened it seemed to say, "There is still
time, but you have not long."
Edith, sitting opposite him, looked up at the sound with a stir of relief.
Ten o'clock. It was time to go home.
"I wonder what's keeping Bruce," she said. Bruce was still in his office
downtown. As a rule on Friday evenings he came with his wife to
supper here, but this week he had some new business on hand. Edith
was vague about it. As she tried to explain she knitted her brows and
said that Bruce was working too hard. And her father grunted assent.
"Bruce ought to knock off every summer," he said, "for a good solid
month, or better two. Can't you bring him up to the mountains this
year?" He referred to the old New Hampshire home which he had kept

as a summer place. But Edith smiled at the idea.
"Yes, I could bring him," she replied, "and in a week he'd be perfectly
crazy to get back to his office again." She compressed her lips. "I know
what he needs--and we'll do it some day, in spite of him."
"A suburb, eh," her father said, and his face took on a look of dislike.
They had often talked of suburbs.
"Yes," his daughter answered, "I've picked out the very house." He
threw at her a glance of impatience. He knew what had started her on
this line. Edith's friend, Madge Deering, was living out in Morristown.
All very well, he reflected, but her case was not at all the same. He had
known Madge pretty well. Although the death of her husband had left
her a widow at twenty-nine, with four small daughters to bring up, she
had gone on determinedly. Naturally smart and able, Madge was
always running to town, keeping up with all her friends and with every
new fad and movement there, although she made fun of most of them.
Twice she had taken her girls abroad. But Edith was quite different. In
a suburb she would draw into her house and never grow another inch.
And Bruce, poor devil, would commute and take work home from the
office. But Roger couldn't tell her that.
"I'd be sorry to see you do it," he said. "I'd miss you up in the
mountains."
"Oh, we'd come up in the summer," she answered. "I wouldn't miss the
mountains for worlds!"
Then they talked of summer plans. And soon again Edith's smooth
pretty brows were wrinkling absorbedly. It was hard in her planning not
to be sure whether her new baby would come in May or early June. It
was only the first of April now. While she talked her father watched her.
He liked her quiet fearlessness in facing the ordeal ahead. Into the
bewildering city he felt her searching anxiously to find good things for
her small brood, to make every dollar count, to keep their little bodies
strong, to guard their hungry little souls from many things she thought
were bad. Of all his daughters, he told himself, she was the one most

like his wife.
While she was talking Bruce came in. Of medium height and a wiry
build, his quick kindly smile of greeting did not conceal the fine tight
lines about his mouth and between his eyes. His small trim moustache
was black, but his hair already showed streaks of gray although he was
not quite thirty-eight, and as he lit a cigarette his right hand twitched
perceptibly.
Bruce Cunningham had married just after he left law school. He had
worked in a law office which took receiverships by the score, and
through managing bankrupt concerns by slow degrees he had made
himself a financial surgeon. He had set up