begun to
regard his marriage as an idyl slipped in between pages of prose. But
when their child was coming, his wife grew restless; she must go home,
he saw; it was natural that she should long to return to her mother at
such a time.

So back to Boston they had gone, Thornton contenting himself with the
reflection that he could go ahead in Boston almost as well as in
Europe; that fortunately he was not tied by money wants, and that the
Camberton laboratories were always open to him. When the little
daughter came he schemed a new move; he was offered a headship of a
laboratory somewhere in the middle West. He began to feel the force of
his father's remarks about transplanting.

Yet they never went. Another man got the appointment while he was
persuading his wife. Her mother was so lonely, now that Ruby was
living in New York. They had no necessity to live far away in order to
earn money. When he proposed moving to Washington, the same ground had
to be gone over again, and the same gentle obstinate resistance to be
met.

"Go to Washington," old Thornton said when his son stood by his
bedside during the last illness. "Go to Washington," he repeated,
querulously. And as the younger man made no reply, but sat with his
hands shoved in his pockets, brooding, the sick man spoke again, "You
will never do anything here."

"Yes, we must make a move," assented his son in a voice that said
"no."

After his father's death, they went to live in the Marlboro' Street
house. There was no more talk of moving away. The Ellwells came in
town for the winter, living in a flat at one of the new hotels near
by. Mrs. Thornton had the habit of spending her mornings in the flat
with her mother and the baby. Thornton could find no reasonable
grounds for the rebellion he felt over this tie, this close proximity
to decay in which he was compelled to live. Yet he loathed the thought
that his child, unimportant as she was now, should begin her life by
imbibing such a forlorn atmosphere.

He could tell each day what had been going on in those long morning
hours; how his wife's sympathies had been on the rack; how mother and
daughter had sighed over the unaccountable miseries of life. She
seemed to him to come home with the old anaemic look, with the old
restless hunger in her face, and then he was reminded that their child
was more than delicate. It would lead him to envy mere gross flesh and
blood, the coarse fibre of some riotously healthy co