ised not to communicate with
Jacky's father.

So Maurice, walking to the office, told himself that everything was all
right--but "a close call!" Then he thought of Jacky, who, at his
command, had so instantly "behaved himself"; and of that grip on his
ear; and again that pang of something he did not recognize made him
swallow hard. "Poor little beggar!" he thought: "I wonder how he is? I
wonder if he'll pull through?" He hoped he would. "Tough on Lily, if
anything happens." But his anxiety--though he did not know it--was not
entirely on Lily's account. For the first time in the child's life,
Maurice was aware of Jacky as a possession. The tornado of the night
before--the anger and fear and pity--had plowed down below the surface
of his mind, and touched that subsoil of conscious responsibility for
creation, the realization that, whether through love or through
selfishness, the man who brings a child into this terrible, squalid,
glorious world, is a creator, even as God is the Creator. So Maurice,
sitting at his desk that next day, answering a client on the telephone,
or making an appointment to go and "look at a house," was really feeling
in his heart--not love, of course, but a consciousness of his own
relation to that little flushed, suffering body out in the contagious
ward of the hospital in Medfield. "Will he pull through?" Maurice asked
himself. It was six years ago that, standing at the door of a
yellow-brick apartment house, with two fingers looped through the
strings of a box of roses, Jacky's father had said, "Perhaps it will be
born dead!" How dry his lips had been that day with the hope of death!
Now, suddenly, his lips were dry with fear that the kid wouldn't pull
through--which would be "tough on Lily." His face was stern with this
new emotion of anxiety which was gradually becoming pain; he even forgot
how scared he had been at the thought that Eleanor _might_ have opened
that telegram. "I swear, I wish I hadn't hurt his feelings about that
cigar stub!" he said. Then he remembered Eleanor: "I could wring Lily's
neck!" But Eleanor hadn't opened the telegram; and Maurice hoped Jacky
would get well--because "it would be tough on Lily" if he didn't. Thus
he dismissed his wife. So long as Lily's recklessness had not done any
harm, it was easy to dismiss her--so very far had she receded into the
dull, patiently-to-be-endured, background of life!

The Eleanor of the next few weeks, who seemed just a little more