Starr, of the Desert | Page 3

reminded her
apathetically. "What did the doctor say about your cough, Babe?"
"Oh, he told me to quit working. Why is it doctors never have any
brains about such things? Charge a person two dollars or so for telling
him to do what's impossible. What does he think I am--a movie
queen?"

She turned away from his faded, anxious eyes that hurt her with their
realization of his helplessness. There was a red spot on either
cheek--the rose of dread which her father had watched heart-sinkingly.
"I know what he thinks is the matter," she added defiantly. "But that
doesn't make it so. It's just the grippe hanging on. I've felt a lot better
since the weather cleared up. It's those raw winds--and half the time
they haven't had the steam on at all in the mornings, and the office is
like an ice-box till the sun warms it."
"Vic home yet?" Peter abandoned the subject for one not much more
cheerful. Vic, fifteen and fully absorbed in his own activities, was more
and more becoming a sore subject between the two.
"No. I called up Ed's mother just before you came, but he hadn't been
there. She thought Ed was over here with Vic. I don't know where else
to ask."
"Did you try the gym?"
"No. He won't go there any more. They got after him for something he
did--broke a window somehow. There's no use fussing, dad. He'll come
when he's hungry enough. He's broke, so he can't eat down town."
Peter sighed and went away to brush his thin, graying hair carefully
over his bald spot, while Helen May brewed the tea and made final
preparations for dinner. The daffodils she arranged with little caressing
pulls and pats in a tall, slim vase of plain glass, and placed the vase in
the center of the table, just as Peter knew she would do.
"Oh, but you're sweet!" she said, and stooped with her face close above
them. "I wish I could lie down in a whole big patch of you and just look
at the sky and at you nodding and perking all around me--and not do a
living thing all day but just lie there and soak in blue and gold and
sweet smells and silence."
Peter, coming to the open doorway, turned and tiptoed back as though
he had intruded upon some secret, and stood irresolutely smoothing his
hair down with the flat of his hand until she called him to come and eat.

She was cheerful as ever while she served him scrupulously. She
smiled at him now and then, tilting her head because the daffodils stood
between them. She said no more about the doctor's advice, or the
problem of poverty. She did not cough, and the movements of her thin,
well-shaped hands were sure and swift. More than once she made a
pause while she pulled a daffodil toward her and gazed adoringly into
its yellow cup.
Peter might have been reassured, were it not for the telltale flush on her
cheeks and the unnatural shine in her eyes. As it was, every fascinating
little whimsy of hers stabbed him afresh with the pain of her need and
of his helplessness. Arizona or New Mexico or Colorado, the doctor
had said; and Peter knew that it must be so. And he with his druggist's
salary and his pitiful two hundred dollars in the savings bank! And with
the druggist's salary stopping automatically the moment he stopped
reporting for duty! Peter was neither an atheist nor a socialist, yet he
was close to cursing his God and his country whenever Helen May
smiled at him around the dozen daffodils.
"Your insurance is due the tenth, dad," she remarked irrelevantly when
they had reached the dessert stage of cream puffs from the delicatessen
nearest Helen May's work. "Why don't you cut it down? It's sinful, the
amount of money we've paid out for insurance. You need a new suit
this spring. And the difference--"
"I don't see what's wrong with this suit," Peter objected, throwing out
his scrawny chest and glancing down his front with a prejudiced eye,
refusing to see any shabbiness. "A little cleaning and pressing,
maybe--"
"A little suit of that new gray everybody's wearing these days, you
mean," she amended relentlessly. "Don't argue, dad. You've got to have
a suit. And that old insurance--"
"Jitneys are getting thicker every day," Peter contended in feeble jest.
"A man needs to be well insured in this town. There's Vic--if anything
happened, he's got to be educated just the same. And by the endowment
plan, in twelve years more I'll have a nice little lump. It's--on account

of the endowment, Babe. I don't want to sell drugs all my life."
"Just the same, you're going