ong while before he put them on for
the first time.

To the outer knowledge of the stranger or the neighbor, William Rudd's
employer had all the good luck that was coming to him, and all of Rudd's
besides. They were antitheses at every point.

Where Rudd was without ambition, importance, family, or funds, Kittredge
was the richest man in town, the man of most impressive family, and
easily the leading citizen. People began to talk him up for Congressman,
maybe for Senator. He had held all the other conspicuous offices in his
church, his bank, his county. You could hardly say that he had ever run
for any office; he had just walked up and taken it.

Yet Rudd did not envy him his record or his family. Clay Kittredge had
children, real children. The cemetery lodged none of them. Yet one of
the girls or boys was always ill or in trouble with somebody; Mrs.
Kittredge was forever cautioning her children not to play with Mrs.
So-and-so's children and Mrs. So-and-so would return the compliment. The
town was fairly torn up with these nursery Guelph and Ghibelline wars.

Rudd compared the wickednesses of other people's children with the
perfections of Eric. Sometimes his evil genius whispered a bitter
thought that if Eric had lived to enter the world this side of the
tobacco smoke, he, too, might have been a complete scoundrel in
knee-breeches, instead of the clean-hearted, clear-skinned, studious,
truthful little gentleman of light and laughter and love that he was.
But Rudd banished the thought.

Eric was never ill, or only ill enough at times to give the parents a
little of the rapture of anxiety and of sitting by his bedside holding
his hand and brushing his hair back from a hot forehead. Eric never was
impolite, or cruel to an animal, or impudent to a teacher, or backward
in a class.

And Rudd's wife differed from Kittredge's wife and wives in general--and
indeed from the old Martha herself--in staying young and growing more
and more beautiful. The old Martha had been too shy and too cognizant of
the truth ever to face a camera; and Rudd often regretted that he owned
not even a bridal photograph such as the other respectable married folks
of Hillsdale had on the wall, or in a crayon enlargement on an uneasy
easel. He had no likeness of Martha except that in his heart. But
thereby his fancy was unshackled and he was enabled to imagine her
sweeter, fairer, every day.

It was the boy alone that grew; the mother, having be