“Like playing with the Donovans instead of the Chesters who lived right next door and were ‘nice boys.’ Then he wouldn’t hunt, and Father was a great hunter. The only thing Edward really loved as sport was baseball, but he never did make the team. He always wore glasses, you know, but that didn’t keep him from getting into fights. I hated the fights—I used to run away, crying. I couldn’t bear to see Edward get beaten, to see Mother’s face when he got home with blood all over his mouth and that funny little look he had, as if he felt somehow—somehow—as if he’d crashed through. I don’t know how to say it, as if coming in to the house which was always so quiet, all bloody and dirty, he had won even when he had really lost. Of course Father approved. That was about the only thing Edward did that Father approved of, as a matter of fact.” Yet the strange thing was that Edward got into those fights when he was so bottled up with rage that it was the only way out, when he hated his father so much that she sometimes had been afraid he would kill him, sitting there at the table at mealtime glaring out of his deep-set blue eyes.

“What did your father really want of Edward?” Henry was asking. It was an effort to pull herself back to the rational plane, to be reasonable when the old anguish was rising in her like a wave, the anguish of being a witness in a family torn to pieces, of dreading every mealtime for fear the storm might break. And perhaps the worst was that the storm so rarely did break, that so much emotion was all the time held in suspense, never precipitated and played out.

“What did Father want?” she repeated the question aloud. Surely not just that Edward should wear white flannels or play golf. What then? “You know what I really think”—she turned to Henry—“I think he was afraid of Edward.”

“That’s queer. Why? I should have thought——”