The Breaking Point | Page 9

"What about the baby at the Homer place?"
"Not due until Sunday. I'll leave my seat number at the box office,
anyhow."
"What are you going to see, Dick?" Mrs. Crosby asked. "Will you have

some dumplings?"
"I will, but David shouldn't. Too much starch. Why, it's 'The Valley,' I
think. An actress named Carlysle, Beverly Carlysle, is starring in it."
He ate on, his mind not on his food, but back in the white house on
Palmer Lane, and a girl. Lucy Crosby, fork in air, stared at him, and
then glanced at David.
But David did not look up from his plate.

III
The Wheeler house was good, modern and commonplace. Walter
Wheeler and his wife were like the house. Just as here and there among
the furniture there was a fine thing, an antique highboy, a Sheraton
sideboard or some old cut glass, so they had, with a certain mediocrity
their own outstanding virtues. They liked music, believed in the home
as the unit of the nation, put happiness before undue ambition, and had
devoted their lives to their children.
For many years their lives had centered about the children. For years
they had held anxious conclave about whooping cough, about small
early disobediences, later about Sunday tennis. They stood united to
protect the children against disease, trouble and eternity.
Now that the children were no longer children, they were sometimes
lonely and still apprehensive. They feared motor car accidents, and
Walter Wheeler had withstood the appeals of Jim for a half dozen years.
They feared trains for them, and journeys, and unhappy marriages, and
hid their fears from each other. Their nightly prayers were "to keep
them safe and happy."
But they saw life reaching out and taking them, one by one. They saw
them still as children, but as children determined to bear their own
burdens. Jim stayed out late sometimes, and considered his manhood in
question if interrogated. Nina was married and out of the home, but

there loomed before them the possibility of maternity and its dangers
for her. There remained only Elizabeth, and on her they lavished the
care formerly divided among the three.
It was their intention and determination that she should never know
trouble. She was tenderer than the others, more docile and gentle. They
saw her, not as a healthy, normal girl, but as something fragile and very
precious.
Nina was different. They had always worried a little about Nina,
although they had never put their anxiety to each other. Nina had
always overrun her dress allowance, although she had never failed to be
sweetly penitent about it, and Nina had always placed an undue
emphasis on things. Her bedroom before her marriage was cluttered
with odds and ends, cotillion favors and photographs, college pennants
and small unwise purchases--trophies of the gayety and conquest which
were her life.
And Nina had "come out." It had cost a great deal, and it was not so
much to introduce her to society as to put a family recognition on a fact
already accomplished, for Nina had brought herself out unofficially at
sixteen. There had been the club ballroom, and a great many flowers
which withered before they could be got to the hospital; and new
clothing for all the family, and a caterer and orchestra. After that, for a
cold and tumultuous winter Mrs. Wheeler had sat up with the dowagers
night after night until all hours, and the next morning had let Nina sleep,
while she went about her household duties. She had aged, rather, and
her determined smile had grown a little fixed.
She was a good woman, and she wanted her children's happiness more
than anything in the world, but she had a faint and sternly repressed
feeling of relief when Nina announced her engagement. Nina did it
with characteristic sangfroid, at dinner one night.
"Don't ring for Annie for a minute, mother," she said. "I want to tell
you all something. I'm going to marry Leslie Ward."
There had been a momentary pause. Then her father said:

"Just a minute. Is that Will Ward's boy?"
"Yes. He's not a boy."
"Well, he'll come around to see me before there's any engagement. Has
that occurred to either of you?"
"Oh, he'll be around. He'd have come to-night, but Howard Moore is
having his bachelor dinner. I hope he doesn't look shot to pieces
to-morrow. These bachelor things--! We'd better have a dinner or
something, mother, and announce it."
There had been the dinner, with a silver loving cup bought for the
occasion, and thereafter to sit out its useless days on the Sheraton
sideboard. And there had been a trousseau and a wedding so expensive
that a small frown of anxiety had developed between Walter Wheeler's
eyebrows and stayed there.