To Elizabeth the first days of Dick's absence were unbelievably dreary.
She seemed to live only from one visit of the postman to the next. She
felt sometimes that only part of her was at home in the Wheeler house,
slept at night in her white bed, donned its black frocks and took them
off, and made those sad daily pilgrimages to the cemetery above the
town, where her mother tidied with tender hands the long narrow mound,
so fearfully remindful of Jim's tall slim body.
That part of her grieved sorely, and spent itself in small comforting
actions and little caressing touches on bowed heads and grief-stooped
shoulders. It put away Jim's clothing, and kept immaculate the room
where now her mother spent most of her waking hours. It sent her on
her knees at night to pray for Jim's happiness in some young-man heaven
which would please him. But the other part of her was not there at all.
It was off with Dick in some mysterious place of mountains and vast
distance called Wyoming.
And because of this division in herself, because she felt that her
loyalty to her people had wavered, because she knew that already she had
forsaken her father and her mother and would follow her love through the
rest of her life, she was touchingly anxious to comfort and to please
them.
"She's taking Dick's absence very hard," Mrs. Wheeler said one night,
when she had kissed them and gone upstairs to bed. "She worries me
sometimes."
Mr. Wheeler sighed. Why was it that a man could not tell his children
what he had learned,--that nothing was so great as one expected; that
love was worth living for, but not dying for. The impatience of youth
for life! It had killed Jim. It was hurting Nina. It would all come,
all come, in God's good time. The young did not live to-day, but always
to-morrow. There seemed no time to live to-day, for any one. First one
looked ahead and said, "I will be so happy." And before one knew it one
was looking back and saying: "I was so happy."
"She'll be all right," he said aloud.
He got up and whistled for the dog.
"I'll take him around the block before I lock up," he said heavily. He
bent over and kissed his wife. She was a sad figure to him in her black
dress. He did not say to her what he thought sometimes; that Jim had
been saved a great deal. That to live on, and to lose the things one
loved, one by one, was harder than to go quickly, from a joyous youth.