ith aspiration
for the life she had tossed aside. I thought of Arnold's grave lips,
steady shoulders, and longing eyes. There fell upon me a vivid sense
of the wonderful ingenuity and richness of life's long processes. This
diverse pair had traveled devious ways to the end that, after all
their married years, they might at last be not unequally mated. My
elderly heart sang a canticle of rejoicing, but my speech was
circumspect.

"I incline to believe that he will," I admitted.

{126}

{127}

CLARISSA'S OWN CHILD

{128}

{129}

CLARISSA'S OWN CHILD

I

It was half-past three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon in April when
Associate Professor Charleroy (of the Midwest University at Powelton)
learned that he was to lose his wife and home.

For April, the day was excessively hot. The mercury stood at
eighty-nine degrees on the stuffy little east porch of the Charleroy
home. There was no ice in the refrigerator, the house-cleaning was not
finished, and the screens were not in. The discomfort of the untimely
heat was very great.

Clarissa Charleroy, tired, busy, and flushed of face, knew that she
was nervous to the point of hysteria. This {130} condition always gave
her a certain added clearness of vision and fluency of speech which
her husband, with justice, had learned to dread. Indeed, she dreaded
it herself. In such moods she often created for herself situations
which she afterwards found irksome. She quite sincerely wished herself
one of the women whom fatigue makes quiet and sodden, instead of
unduly eloquent.

Paul Charleroy, coming from a classroom, found his wife in the
dining-room, ironing a shirt-waist. The door was open into the little
kitchen beyond, where the range fire was burning industriously, and
the heat poured steadily in.

"I thought it would be cooler in here," Clarissa explained wearily,
"but it is n't. I have to get these waists ready to wear, and a
gingham dress {131} ironed for Marvel. The child is simply roasted in
that woolen thing. But the starch _will_ stick to the irons!"

Professor Charleroy shut the door into the kitchen. He frowned at the
ironing-board, balanced on two chairs in front of the window. Small
changes in the household arrangements were likely to discompose him.
In his own house he was vaguely conscious always of seeking a calm
which did not exist there.

"Can't the washerwoman do that iron