The Kentons | Page 8

eagerness she had, "Didn't poppa talk once of
going South this winter?"
"He talked of going to New York," the mother answered, with a throb
of hope.

"Well," the girl returned, patiently, and Mrs. Kenton read in her
passivity an eagerness to be gone from sorrow that she would not suffer
to be seen, and interpreted her to her father in such wise that he could
not hesitate.

II.
If such a thing could be mercifully ordered, the order of this event had
certainly been merciful; but it was a cruel wrench that tore Kenton from
the home where he had struck such deep root. When he actually came
to leave the place his going had a ghastly unreality, which was
heightened by his sense of the common reluctance. No one wanted to
go, so far as he could make out, not even Ellen herself, when he tried to
make her say she wished it. Lottie was in open revolt, and animated her
young men to a share in the insurrection. Her older brother was kindly
and helpfully acquiescent, but he was so far from advising the move
that Kenton had regularly to convince himself that Richard approved it,
by making him say that it was only for the winter and that it was the
best way of helping Ellen get rid of that fellow. All this did not enable
Kenton to meet the problems of his younger son, who required him to
tell what he was to do with his dog and his pigeons, and to declare at
once how he was to dispose of the cocoons he had amassed so as not to
endanger the future of the moths and butterflies involved in them. The
boy was so fertile in difficulties and so importunate for their solution,
that he had to be crushed into silence by his father, who ached in a
helpless sympathy with his reluctance.
Kenton came heavily upon the courage of his wife, who was urging
forward their departure with so much energy that he obscurely accused
her of being the cause of it, and could only be convinced of her
innocence when she offered to give the whole thing up if he said so.
When he would not say so, she carried the affair through to the bitter
end, and she did not spare him some, pangs which she perhaps need not
have shared with him. But people are seldom man and wife for half
their lives without wishing to impart their sufferings as well as their
pleasures to each other; and Mrs. Kenton, if she was no worse, was no
better than other wives in pressing to her husband's lips the cup that
was not altogether sweet to her own. She went about the house the
night before closing it, to see that everything was in a state to be left,

and then she came to Kenton in his library, where he had been burning
some papers and getting others ready to give in charge to his son, and
sat down by his cold hearth with him, and wrung his soul with the tale
of the last things she had been doing. When she had made him bear it
all, she began to turn the bright side of the affair to him. She praised the
sense and strength of Ellen, in the course the girl had taken with herself,
and asked him if he, really thought they could have done less for her
than they were doing. She reminded him that they were not running
away from the fellow, as she had once thought they must, but Ellen was
renouncing him, and putting him out of her sight till she could put him
out of her mind. She did not pretend that the girl had done this yet; but
it was everything that she wished to do it, and saw that it was best.
Then she kissed him on his gray head, and left him alone to the first
ecstasy of his homesickness.
It was better when they once got to New York, and were settled in an
apartment of an old-fashioned down-town hotel. They thought
themselves very cramped in it, and they were but little easier when they
found that the apartments over and under them were apparently thought
spacious for families of twice their numbers. It was the very quietest
place in the whole city, but Kenton was used to the stillness of
Tuskingum, where, since people no longer kept hens, the nights were
stiller than in the country itself; and for a week he slept badly.
Otherwise, as soon as they got used to living in six rooms instead of
seventeen, they were really very comfortable.
He could see that his wife was glad of the release from housekeeping,
and she