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the conventions.
Strange to say, David did not "go to smash." To the intense chagrin of
the wiseacres he prospered despite an unprecedented disregard for the
teachings of his father and his grandfather before him. The wolf stayed
a long way off from his door, the prophetic mortgage failed to lay its
blight upon his lands, his crops were bountiful, his acreage spread as
the years went by,--and so his uncles, his cousins and his aunts were
never so happy as when wishing for the good old days when his father
was alive and running the farm as it should be run! If David had

married some good, sensible, thrifty, hard-working farmer's
daughter,--Well, it might not have meant an improvement in the crops
but it certainly would have spared him the expense of a tennis court,
and theatre-going, and absolutely unnecessary trips to Chicago or
Indianapolis whenever SHE took it into her head to go. Besides, it
wasn't natural that they should deliberately put off having children. It
wasn't what God and the country expected. After a year had passed and
there were no symptoms of approaching motherhood, certain
narrow-minded relatives began to blame Great Britain for the outrage
and talked a great deal about a worn-out, deteriorating race.
Then, after two years, when a girl baby was born to David and his wife,
they couldn't, for the life of them, understand how it came to pass that it
wasn't a boy. There had been nothing but boys in the Windom family
for years and years. It appeared to be a Windom custom. And here was
this fair-haired outsider from across the sea breaking in with a girl!
They could not believe it possible. David,--a great, strong, perfect
specimen of a Windom,--the father of a girl! Why, they emphasized, he
was over six feet tall, strong as an ox, broad-shouldered,--as fine a
figure as you would see in a lifetime. There was something
wrong,--radically wrong.
The district suffered another shock when a nurse maid was added to
David's household,--a girl from the city who had nothing whatever to
do, except to take care of the baby while the unnatural mother tinkered
with the flower-beds, took long walks about the farm, rode horseback,
and played tennis with David and a silly crowd of young people who
had fallen into evil ways.
She died when her daughter was ten years old. Those who had
misunderstood her and criticized her in the beginning, mourned her
deeply, sincerely, earnestly in the end, for she had triumphed over
prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and a certain form of malice. The whole
district was the better for her once hateful innovations, and there was
no one left who scoffed at David Windom for the choice he had made
of a wife.
Her death wrought a remarkable, enduring change in Windom. He

became a silent, brooding man who rarely smiled and whose heart lay
up in the little graveyard on the ridge. The gay, larksome light fled
from his eyes, his face grew stern and sometimes forbidding. She had
taken with her the one great thing she had brought into his life:
ineffable buoyancy. He no longer played, for there was no one with
whom he would play; he no longer sang, for the music had gone out of
his soul; he no longer whistled the merry tunes, for his lips were stiff
and unyielding. Only when he looked upon his little daughter did the
soft light of love well up into his eyes and the rigid mouth grow tender.
She was like her mother. She was joyous, brave and fair to look upon.
She had the same heart of sunshine, the same heart of iron, and the blue
in her eyes was like the blue of the darkening skies. She adored the
grim, silent man who was her father, and she was the breath of life to
him.
And then, when she was nineteen, she broke the heart of David
Windom. For two years she had been a student in the University
situated but half a score of miles from the place where she was born, a
co-educational institution of considerable size and importance.
Windom did not believe in women's colleges. He believed in the free
school with its broadening influence, its commingling of the sexes in
the search for learning, and in the divine right of woman to develop her
mind through the channels that lead ultimately and inevitably to
superiority of man. He believed that the girl trained and educated in
schools devoted exclusively to the finer sex fails to achieve
understanding as well as education. The only way to give a girl a
practical education,--and he believed that every woman should have
one,--was to start her off even with the boy who was training to become
her master