— We are young but we have learned in our youth to control the forces of water and air — the forces which are locked into ore and coal.
— Old countries are dying and passing away. England is weak with age, an ancient empire, her rulers grown tired. France is sunk in dreams and Italy slumbers. But we of America, we are awake. The name America will be heard among every people. It is our time, our hour. It is we who will write the history of the centuries to come. …”
Candace had listened, alarmed and half ashamed and yet fascinated. This was William, her husband!
That night in the silence of their own house she had been unusually silent. He had seemed exhausted, his face pallid as water under a gray sky, and he did not speak to her.
“You were very eloquent tonight, William,” she had said at last, because something was necessary to be spoken between them. “I suppose your preacher father is somewhere in you, after all.”
“I wasn’t preaching,” he had said harshly. “I was telling the truth.”
At this moment the telephone rang upon the small rosewood table beside her bed and, lifting the receiver, she heard her father’s nasal voice.
“William?”
“William is at the office, Father,” she told him. “There’s only me at home.”
He hesitated. “You in bed, Candy?”
“Not really. I’m just upstairs because I don’t like being downstairs alone.”
“Maybe I’ll come around. Your mother’s got a sick headache and she’s gone to sleep.”
“Do, Father. I’ll come down and be waiting.”
Such visits at night were not unusual. Her father liked to walk in darkness when the city streets were empty, and once or twice a month he rang the doorbell and when the door was opened stood peering doubtfully into the hall. “William here?”
It was always his first question, though why Candace did not know, for sometimes he came in whether William were home or not, to stay a moment or an hour. He had a delicacy which told him, his foot upon the threshold, whether his visit was opportune.
Tonight she was more than usually pleased, for she was in a mood to talk and there was no one with whom she could talk more easily than with her father. Her mother was well enough when it came to the matter of servants and children but tonight she wanted to talk about something more, although she did not know exactly what.
When the doorbell rang she hastened downstairs to open the door herself, for the maids were asleep. Her father stood upon the big door mat, looking gray and cold and yet somehow cheerful, the tip of his long nose red and his eyes small and keen.
“This is nice,” he said as she took off his overcoat. “I feel in the need of a little light conversation. It looks like rain and my knees are stiff.”
“You shouldn’t be walking on such a night,” she scolded with love.
“I shan’t yield my life to my knees,” he said.
The fire was red coals in the living-room grate and he took the tongs from her. He was skillful at fires, manipulating the live coals under the fresh fuel and coaxing a flame from the least of materials. It was one of his pet economies, left over from the days when as a child he had picked up coal from the railroad yards in a Pennsylvania mining town.
When the fire was blazing he sat down, rubbing his hands clean on his white silk handkerchief. “Well, how’s tricks?”
“Oh, we’re all well,” she replied. “Willie is on the honor roll at school. William was quite pleased. The real news is that William’s parents are coming from China.”
“I thought they’d decided to stay for another year.”
“So did I.”
“It’s the old lady, I imagine,” he said thoughtfully and gazed into the fire. “I suppose William’s glad?”
Candace laughed. “He seems rather annoyed.”
Roger Cameron liked to hear his daughter laugh. He looked up and smiled. It was a pleasant moment, the big room shadowed in corners and lit here by the fire and the lamp. She looked pretty in a rose-colored wool dressing gown, pretty and maybe happy, too. For a while after her marriage he had wondered if she was happy and them had decided she could be, mainly because she had a fine digestion and no ambitions. He had taken care in her education that she should not be placed in the atmosphere of ambitious women. There were such women in the Stores, and none of them, he believed, were happy. His secretary, Minnie Forbes, whom he had employed since she was twenty-one, was devoured with dry unhappiness, perhaps because Minnie would have been shocked to know that she was in love with her employer. Roger knew very well that she was and was grateful for her ignorance. He himself loved his wife in a mild satisfactory way, and had no desire to love anyone else. The brief months when as a young man he had been passionately in love with her he remembered as extremely uncomfortable, for he could not keep his mind on his business. He had been relieved when he discovered that she was not the extraordinary creature his fancy had led him to imagine her, and then he had settled down to the homely and unromantic married love which he had enjoyed now throughout forty peaceful years. He and his wife were deeply attached, but she did not regret his business trips, and he enjoyed them with the single-minded pursuit of more business.
“William never did quite know what to do with his family,” he now said.
“Are they queer, Father?” Candace’s blue eyes were always frank. “I can’t seem to remember even his mother very well.”
“I suppose anybody that goes off to foreign countries is queer in a way,” he replied. “Ordinary folks stay at home. Still, they are always taking up collections in churches and all that. William’s father is no more than a preacher who goes beyond what’s considered his average duty. ‘Go ye into all the world,’ and so on. But nobody much takes it seriously, except a few. They’re always good men, of course.”
“And the women?”
“I don’t believe Mrs. Lane would have gone on her own hook. I suppose she went because he did. Not too much sympathy between them, as I remember.”
He did not want to tell his daughter that he remembered Mrs. Lane as a pushing sort of woman. Maybe she wasn’t. People often became pushing when they were with a rich man. He had got used to it. Anyway, it was all in the family now.
“Jeremy’s little Mollie is a cute trick,” he said, smiling.
“She is,” Candace agreed. “Ruth tells me she talks all the time. When she comes here she is shy and won’t say a word.”
“She talks to me if I’m by myself. It’s wonderful to watch the first opening of a child’s mind.”
“Ruth and I are going to have to look after Mother and Father Lane. William is working on a new paper.”
“What’s he want with more work?” Roger took out his pipe. He had not begun smoking until recently and he still felt strange with the toy. But he had wanted something to occupy his hands.
“The Duke of Gloucester knits,” he said, perceiving a gleam now in his daughter’s candid blue eyes. “That’s all very well for an Englishman. We American men aren’t up to it yet I don’t really like this smoking, but it takes time to fill the pipe and light it and it goes out a good deal. It’s all occupation.”
“What’s the matter with you American men?” Candace asked, her eyes bright, her mouth demure.
“An Englishman is never afraid of being laughed at,” Roger replied. “He just thinks the other fellow is a fool. But Americans still can’t risk anybody laughing at them. I can’t, myself. Tough as I am I couldn’t knit, even if I wanted to. I don’t want to, though.”
“You don’t want to smoke, either,” she mocked.
He grinned at her sheepishly and went on with his maneuvers while she watched, still ready to laugh. “I guess I like to play with fire,” he said when at last he was puffing smoke, his eyes watering. “What I like best is getting it ready and striking the match.”