"And as I answered you both," said his wife, trying hard to keep the conversation spinning lightly in the air as he did, "it's because I want her to be more like other girls."

"And I," said her husband, "do not." This was the place for Mildred Lorimer to fling her own why but her husband was too quick for her. "Because she is so much finer and sounder and saner and sweeter as she is. Mildred, I have never seen any living creature so selfless. What was the word they coined in that play about Mars?—'Otherdom?' That's it, yes; otherdom. That's Honor Carmody.[Pg 10] She could have finished grammar school at twelve, but Jimsy needed her help."

[Pg 10]

"That's just it! Can't you see how wrong that is?"

"No. I'm too much occupied with seeing how right it is. Good Lord, my dear, in a world given over to the first person perpendicular, can't you see the amazing beauty and rarity of your child's soul? Every day and all day long she gives herself,—to you, to me, to the kiddies, to her friends. She is the eternal mother." Mildred Lorimer was not the eternal mother. She was not in fact a mother at all. The physical fact of motherhood had six times descended upon her and she was doing her gentle, well-bred, conscientious best in six lively directions, but under it all she was forever Helen, forever the best beloved. She was getting rather beyond her depth but she was not giving up. Stephen, in discussion, had an elusive way of soaring into hazy generalities. She brought him down.

"I can't see why it should make her any less unselfish to attend the best girls' school than to—to run with the boys." She brought out the little vulgarism with a faint curl of her lovely lip.

"'Run with the boys!' That has a positively Salem flavor, hasn't it? Almost as deadly, that 'with,' as 'after,'" He loved words, Stephen [Pg 11]Lorimer; he played with them and juggled them. "Yet isn't that exactly what the girls of to-day must and should do? Isn't it what the girls of to-morrow—naturally, unrebuked—will do? Not running after them, slyly or brazenly; not sitting at home, crimped and primped and curled, waiting to be run after. No," he said hotly, getting up and beginning to swallow up the room from wall to wall with his long strides, "no! With them. Running with them, chin in, chest out, sound, conditioned, unashamed!" He believed that he meant to write a tremendous book, one day, Honor's stepfather. He often reeled off whole chapters in his mind, warm and glowing. It was only when he got it down on paper that it cooled and congealed. 

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