Solution Manual For Discovering The Life Span 1st Edition by Feldman and Landry ISBN 0133152693 9780133152692
Solution Manual For Discovering The Life Span 1st Edition by Feldman and Landry ISBN 0133152693 9780133152692
Solution Manual For Discovering The Life Span 1st Edition by Feldman and Landry ISBN 0133152693 9780133152692
Learning Objectives
After reading Module 2.1, students will know
Module Outline
I. Growth and Stability
A. Physical Growth: The Rapid Advances of Infancy
1. By age 5 months, the average infant's birthweight has doubled to about 15 pounds.
2. By age 1, the infant’s birthweight has tripled to approximately 22 pounds.
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Copyright © 2009 Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458. All rights reserved.
3. By the end of its second year, the average child weighs four times its birthweight.
4. By age 1, the average baby stands 30 inches tall.
5. By the end of the second year, the average child is 3 feet tall.
6. Not all parts of the body grow at the same rate.
7. The CEPHALOCAUDAL PRINCIPLE states that growth follows a pattern
that begins with the head and upper body parts and then proceeds to the rest
of the body.
8. The PROXIMODISTAL PRINCIPLE states that development proceeds from
the center of the body outward.
9. The PRINCIPLE OF HIERARCHICAL INTEGRATION states that simple
skills typically develop separately and independently but are later integrated
into more complex skills.
10. The PRINCIPLE OF INDEPENDENCE OF SYSTEMS suggests that
different body systems grow at different rates.
B. The Nervous System and Brain: The Foundations of Development
1. The nervous system comprises the brain and the nerves that extend throughout
the body.
2. Infants are born with between 100 and 200 billion NEURONS, the nerve cells of
the nervous system.
a) Neurons communicate with other neurons by means of chemical transmitters
that travel across the small gaps between neurons, known as synapses.
3. As the infant's experience in the world increases, neurons that do not become
interconnected become unnecessary and die off – a process called SYNAPTIC
PRUNING.
4. Neurons increase in size.
a) Neurons become coated with MYELIN, a fatty substance that helps
insulate neurons and speeds transmission of nerve impulses.
b) The brain triples its weight in the first 2 years of life.
c) The infant's brain is 3/4 its adult size by age 2.
5. As they grow, neurons become arranged by function.
a) Some move into the CEREBRAL CORTEX, the upper layer of the brain.
b) Others move to subcortical levels, which regulate fundamental activites
such as breathing and heart rate and are below the cerebral cortex.
6. PLASTICITY is the degree to which a developing structure (e.g., the brain) or
behavior is susceptible to experience and is relatively great for the brain.
a) Infants who grow up in severely restricted environments are likely to
show differences in brain structure and weight.
b) Research with nonhumans reveals that a SENSITIVE PERIOD exists, which is
a specific but limited time span, usually early in an organism's life, during
which the organism is particularly susceptible to environmental influences
relating to some particular facet of development.
C. Integrating the Bodily Systems: The Life Cycles of Infancy
1. Behavior becomes integrated through the development of various body
RHYTHMS, which are repetitive, cyclical patterns of behavior.
2. An infant's STATE is the degree of awareness it displays to both internal
and external stimulation
a) Although irregular in infant brain waves become regular by age 3.
3. Changes are reflected in brain waves measured by a device called an EEG,
or electroencephalogram.
4. The major state occupying the infant is sleep.
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a) On average, newborns sleep 16-17 hours daily, ranging from 10 to 20 hours
a day.
b) Sleep stages are fitful and "out of sync" during early infancy.
c) By the end of the first year most infants are sleeping through the night for
a total of about 15 hours.
d) Infants have a cycle of sleep similar to but different than REM —
RAPID EYE MOVEMENT, the period of sleep found in adults and
children and associated with dreaming.
(1) Brain waves are different than the dreaming sleep of adults.
(2) This active REM-like sleep takes up half an infant’s sleep at first.
(3) Researchers think the function of REM sleep in infants is to provide
a means for the brain to stimulate itself – a process called
autostimulation.
(4) Cultural practices affect the sleep patterns of infants.
e) SUDDEN INFANT DEATH SYNDROME (SIDS) is a disorder in
which seemingly healthy infants die in their sleep.
(1) It affects 1 in 1,000 infants in the U.S. annually.
(2) No cause has been found.
(3) It is the leading cause of death in children under 1 year old.
(4) Since “back-to-sleep” was recommended by the American
Academy of Pediatrics there has been a significant decrease in
the number of SIDS deaths.
73
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Language: English
Credits: Al Haines
By
Margaret Wilson
Copyright, 1926, by
Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U. S. A.
Little Martha Kenworthy, to use her own careless expression, was "in
bad with her dad," as usual. But she was not a girl to be disturbed by a
trifle of that sort. She had been home only a few days from her college in
the east for her second summer holiday, and had been followed too
closely by official comments on her term's work. The only explanation
she saw fit to give to her father on that subject was to the effect that he
should forget it. Her mother had taken him aside and said privately,
firmly, and coaxingly:
"Now, Bob, I'm not going to have that child's life made miserable by
somebody else's brilliance. It isn't Martha's fault that she hasn't
phenomenal brains. I'm not going to have her scolded for being like me."
"Bronson's spoiled you, Bob. That's all the matter with you. You're
always wishing Martha would dazzle people, sort of make them sit up
and blink, the way he used to. It's all right for a boy to be so terribly
clever, but it would be awkward for a woman. It would make her
conspicuous, Bob."
"Well, I wouldn't care so much, Emily, if I could even get a rise out of
her about it. I light into her, and you know what she says! 'Yes, daddy!
Yes, daddy!' like a little angel. And she hasn't the least idea of doing
anything about it. If she'd get good and mad about it once, we could get
some place. She just goes on like a little mule!"
"No one but you ever calls her a mule, Bob," Emily cajoled him.
"Other people seem to lead her about easy enough."
"I never saw a kid less like her mother in my life! I never saw
anybody like her. I know I only got through exams. by the skin of my
teeth, but I did work now and then."
"Martha works hard enough when anything interests her. You ought to
see people look at her room, Bob. Grace, Mrs. Phillips, said to me day
before yesterday, 'Goodness, Emily, you've got a clever daughter. How
old is Martha? I thought she was only nineteen.' She doesn't think she's
stupid, Bob. You just wait. Martha'll make you proud of her yet!"
"Oh, I'm waiting, all right. I've always been waiting. You might hurry
her along a bit, old girl!"
So Bob had waited all that day, without seizing more than two or three
fleeting opportunities to "roast" her about that report, and he was still
waiting the next noon in a rather abused mood for some of those signs of
promise that his wife was always talking about. He was thinking about it
as he walked up to dinner, when he suddenly shuddered to recognize his
car, that he ought to have been riding home in, disguised by loads of
flowers, overflowing with bobbed heads, young arms and joys and
shriekings, turned violently—to escape crashing into a milk truck—up
over the curb into a neighbor's lawn, just missing an altogether
unyielding elm.
Martha was clever enough at least to avoid her father until dinner was
on the table. Emily, helping the crippled old maid-of-all-work in the
dining room, heard them at it as they came in toward the table.
"I say you were coming around that corner at forty miles an hour!"
Then suddenly stopping: "What's this, Emily! No company for dinner?
Where's all the gang? My g-o-oodness! this is a treat! I told you, Martha
——!"
Bob spoke with the abruptness of a man who sells hundreds of cars a
year, and repairs thousands while their drivers wait. And Martha, when
she bothered to reply to him, spoke like a siren from some island of lotus
eaters. Her sentences, instead of ending crisply, trailed away rather, and
were lost in indifference. Emily scarcely knew what to make of her, at
times, nowadays. She had always been a quiet child. On the occasions of
high delight in her childhood, which made other children laugh and shout
and dance about with glee, little Martha had always stood still, her hands
clasped together, and shone all over, with her gray eyes, her little pursed-
up mouth, her whole little soft face. The shouting, squealing, roaring sort
of little rejoicers are lovely, too, Emily had often thought. But this
distinctive rising into shining quietness which was so characteristically
Martha, had been a rare and fascinating kind of infant charm. And now,
in the blossom of her maidenhood, Martha seemed instinctively to have
chosen quietness, and passivity for her weapon of defense and conquest.
When she flirted, and when she quarreled with her father, her voice was
like the falling of "tired eyelids on tired eyes." Emily had said to Bob,
perplexed by Martha's unconciliatory behavior to one whom Emily
would have called in her youth an admirer, "Johnnie just wants to grab
Martha and give her a shaking when she looks at him like that." And Bob
replied, indignantly: "You bet your bottom dollar he does! That's why
she does it!"
And now Martha, consuming a chop with haste, displeased with her
father's outburst, lifted her eyes slowly toward him and looked at him
casually for a moment, and then, letting her eyelashes fall, devoted
herself to the chop, as she might have given a moment's careless
attention to an English sparrow perched on the window sill of the house
across the road. And she drawled, unperturbed to the last degree:
"I think you're mistaken, dad. I don't believe I was driving that fast.
And, anyway, I stopped in time. A miss is as good as a mile, I suppose."
"Not with my car, it isn't. Not by a damned sight! You'd think it was a
Lizzie the way you treat it. A mile is better than a miss with you, and
don't you forget it! If this happens again, I won't let you drive the car all
summer!"
"I said I was sorry, didn't I? I said I wouldn't do it again. You never
saw me do a thing like that before, did you?"
"No, I didn't, young lady. You didn't imagine I was anywhere about,
or I wouldn't have seen you this time, either! I give you credit for that
much sense, at least!"
"How sweet of you, daddy!"
"Can't you see what you did?" Bob demanded, excited by her
indifference. "Can't you see that if——"
"You talk as if I'd plowed up all Parker's lawn. By the way, why don't
you get that bridge on Whinney's road fixed, father? Have we got to go
that dusty detour all summer every time we want a game of golf, when
we're only here three months?"
"Do you hear that, Emily? I try to put a little sense into her head, and
she begins blaming me because that road isn't mended. Do you think the
roads in this county are made for you kids? 'You haven't had that car a
year,' Perkins says to me yesterday, 'and it looks like a bootleggers'
express.' 'Bootleggers nothing! It's the women,' I said. 'They may be frail,
but fenders crumble under them.' I remember I said to you——"
"Mother, why don't you speak up? You aren't functioning. After all,
we worked all morning getting you those flowers, and this is all the
thanks we get for it. I tell you, mommie, there are absolute tubs of
delphiniums in Carson's cellar. Heavenly blues! They'll look cooler than
anything to-night. This afternoon we're——"
"How could you expect to see anything with all that stuff piled in
front of you?"
"Stuff! He calls them 'stuff.' They're all named varieties," she said,
"with pedigrees behind them."
"Emily, I tell you the car looked like a florist's moving. That young
fool of a Johnnie Benton riding clear home on the running board with his
arms full of——"
"I wouldn't let him inside, mother." Martha spoke virtuously. "I knew
you didn't want them all crushed."
"Well, anyway, he saved the flowers, I'll say that for him. It's more
than I expected him to do, if he did get a fall."
"And he didn't even have a shirt on, Emily. His coat flew open as he
fell——"
"Oh, Bob, surely he must have had a shirt on! What did he have on,
Martha?"
Bob snorted.
"Who said anything about undershirts? A nice thing for a girl like you
to be talking about!"
"All I say is, he wasn't dressed right to go riding with girls. You listen
to what I'm saying, Martha! If you had gone bang into the truck, not a
bone in your body——"
And what happened then to interrupt him, Bob said happened every
time he tried to "settle" Martha. A hooting and a tooting of horns, and
laughing and whistles, from the street intervened. Martha jumped up.
"There they are," she said to her mother. "Send the car up by three,
dad. I suppose you can trust the old bus to me if mother is along. It isn't a
Rolls-Royce, after all." She stood gobbling down the dessert. With her
fork she pushed together the last crumbs on her plate, and lifting it, she
turned her smooth bobbed head halfway towards her father, and
practically winking one gray eye towards her mother, she remarked,
demurely, with an indifference that made the words absurd:
"Well, Bob, I've told you that she's reached years of discretion——"
"She chooses to use your expressions. I'm not going to say anything. I
spanked her often enough for it when she was a baby. Anyway, she only
does it to annoy you. She never uses it with me."
"God alone knows what she uses when she's with that gang!"
"Oh, well, they're having a good time, Bob. She won't be home many
more summers."
And Emily, sitting there enjoying her juicy sweet cherries thoroughly,
found some pleasure in the situation. At least, it had its elements of
satisfaction in it, even though the growing—what should she call it?—
misunderstanding between Martha and Bob made her sigh, often. For
twenty years she had been annoyed, inwardly and ineffectively, by Bob's
choice of expletives. And this chit of a child, by her occasional use of
them that made her father shudder, kept him free from them for weeks
together. If in her childhood he had ignored her, at least undervalued her,
he was getting well paid for it just at present.
"Just as if I hadn't said a word to her! 'Send up the car at three,' she
says, just like that, as if it was her car. You'd think the only reason a
father existed was to keep a car in repair for her."
"Well, that is one reason for them existing. Besides, she did say she
was sorry. She said it two or three times. She promised not to do it again.
I'm never afraid when she's driving, Bob. She never seems to me to lose
her head."
"Oh no. Of course not. She's mighty careful to keep you on her side.
She wouldn't——"
"On her side, old silly," Emily said, soothingly. "You talk as if there
was some quarrel between you two. You know very well that if there was
I'd never let her know I was, for a second. She's worked like a Trojan for
to-night. I didn't see how I could possibly get over to Elgin this
afternoon. And she offered to drive me over."
"Never you mind about that! She'll not miss anything. She'll go
shopping while you call, if she can find anything worth buying. Or else
she's made a date to meet somebody. I bet three minutes after she leaves
you there, she'll have some young idiot making eyes at her in that car. I'll
bet you a dollar she's 'phoned some of them she's coming over."
"Well, suppose she has, Bob. What do you expect of a girl? Do you
want her to sit in the car with her eyes shut till I'm ready to come home?
Why shouldn't she call up her friends?"
"Oh, I know it, Emily. But it's the principle of the thing. They're such
a lazy bunch. They never do a thing but spend money and dance. That's
what Fielding was saying to me."
"Oh, well; have it your own way. They're all angels, if you say they
are. I never interfere with them. Give them enough rope and they'll all
hang themselves."
"Have some more pie," Emily urged. "A little more pie won't hurt
you. I've got to begin canning cherries to-morrow."
"Oh, can the canning! What do you want to stew in the kitchen for,
weather like this?"
When Emily left the table she went quickly to the kitchen. Strange
how the maid's conscience could prick the mistress! Old Maggie now
was crippled and Emily had promised to take the ironed clothes
yesterday from the clothes horse and put them away. She had forgotten,
almost cruelly forgotten, for to have something done on Thursday that
should have been done on Wednesday was pain to Maggie. To that
pathetic sensitiveness her years of faithful service had brought her. No
woman in town but Emily would have endured the crankiness of the old
thing, the neighbors said. But Emily from infancy had been used to her
tyranny, and to her any servant was better than none at all. She
apologized for having forgotten. And Maggie, hobbling around,
demanded that she look at Martha's best "chimmey." The woman had
scorched it, burned it, and doubled her fault carefully in so Emily
wouldn't see it. And Emily looked at it, and grumbled a little,
sympathizingly, and then spoiled the effect of her good deed by saying
the garment was almost worn out, anyway. Whereat Maggie snorted. Did
that excuse the careless, lazy, sneaky woman for folding it in so
deceitfully? Certainly not, Emily hurried to assure her, trying to sound
efficient and superior, and knowing as she went through the living room
with an armful of mending that she had seemed as usual but a broken
reed to the old thing who needed something strong, now, to lean on.
"You know she's gone to work on the committee, getting things ready
for to-night. She's busy."
Emily had intended to get a lot of work done before Martha came
back for her. Those bathroom sash curtains really must be changed. But a
neighbor "ran in" for a minute. She wanted to talk about her grandchild,
and Emily forgot her hurry. And then she thought she would take some
of those lovely columbines to her friend's mother in Elgin. And so she
went out and cut some, and wasn't at all ready to go when Martha came
for her, calling up to her to hurry if she wanted to get back by five. But
Emily seized her and made her wait.
"Martha, sit down a minute. Listen to me. You're a bad child. You
ought to be spanked. I wish——"
"Oh, I know it, mother," Martha answered, sincerely. "I'm the limit.
Can you imagine me talking that way to anyone else? But dad does get
my goat, some way. What does he want to keep on after me for, after I've
told him I'm sorry? He's just got into the habit of ya-ya-ya-ing at me, and
he'll just have to get out of it. I'm not going to have it. Did you see him
writhe, mother, when I mygodded him?" And Martha chuckled.
"We've had enough of that now, Martha! You can stop that just now.
You know I don't think you're the one to correct your father!"
"But if I don't, who will? You're no good at it. You're too good-
natured with him, you old precious lamb. He knows you don't like his
godding. Does he stop? I know he doesn't like mine. Do I stop? We've
got to be logical."
"Oh, I don't know about that. If he keeps it just for himself, he's a
selfish pig. If he keeps it partly for ours, why should we hesitate to
acknowledge it? You're always defending him."
"Well, maybe I shouldn't have said defense. That's not the word,
maybe. But you'll have to acknowledge that he needs a good deal of—
ahem—explanation, mother. You see for yourself he stops swearing like
a sailor when I take him in hand. Everybody says 'My God.' But when he
uses it you'd think he was a drunken sailor. Mother, come along. There's
all that decoration to do when we get back. You can't trust them to do
anything unless somebody's there to boss them. Get your hat."
They went out of the door together, and down the front walk to where
the car waited in thick shade. The famous barberry hedge that divides the
Kenworthy front lawn from the street dozes faintly in June, waking
really only in October. But the lindens whose branches almost met across
the narrow street were in the murmurous climax of leaf and blossom that
day. Emily climbed into the car. Martha jumped in, slipped into the
driving seat, and banged the door after her. Now Emily, when necessity
compelled her to manipulate Bob's car, approached it humbly and coaxed
it into action, praying it would get around the next corner safely. But
Martha just seized it, and slapped it into obedience, and imperiously
commanded it hither and thither hastily. Emily never saw her take charge
of it without a sort of impulse of awe. The car, like everything else
expensive, seemed to become the girl. She moved her hands on the large
steering wheel with that surprising composure which Emily had admired
from her babyhood. She always drove bareheaded. The breeze scarcely
disturbed her hair, which was cut and combed almost as it had been ten
years ago, when Jim Kenworthy used to sit and stroke it thoughtfully.
There was never a day when Martha was at home that Emily didn't
notice how distinguished the absolute straightness and fineness of that
black hair seemed among shingled and marcelled heads. Bob didn't like
bobbed hair, but he didn't make such an absolute fool of himself on the
subject as some men did. Emily herself liked to think that there had
never been any "putting up" of hair for her daughter. There had never
been a day when a box of hairpins definitely divided her maturity from
her childhood. There had never been any letting down of skirts for
Martha. Her frocks, still cut simply, hung from her shoulders to—well,
why should a man go fussing on indefinitely about the length of his
daughter's skirts, after they had been determined! Of course, if Martha
had had fat legs, and shaky hips, like some girls whose names might be
mentioned, Emily might not have admired the prevailing styles so
sincerely. But Martha was built slenderly enough, gracefully enough, to
justify them, Emily thought, looking at her sitting there like a little child,
in that pink gingham frock, uncorseted, unrestrained, all delicately and
subtly blooming with color.
Because Martha was happy. That was the whole point. If her mother
had divorced her father, or deserted him, surely there must have been
something like a shadow, a sort of dimness, over the child's
consciousness. But now how gay she was, how perfectly gay and light-
hearted. For Emily, who had been an unhappy lonely young girl, that was
enough. She fervently now loved the months when the whole house rose
up to the zest of youth, when the rugs were rolled up and the victrola
going, when the refrigerator was raided nightly, when the clothes lines
were always adorned with swimming suits, the bathroom overflowing
with girls, the railings even of the veranda lined with lads, cigarettes
gleaming in the darkness of the garden—why ask whether feminine or
masculine cigarettes—when there was no sleep till the last lingering car
departing had made the night strident. Bob grumbled incessantly about
Martha's company. But must not an only child, most of all, have friends
about? "You'd think the house was run for that girl," Bob complained.
And Emily answered to herself, for she was a wise one: "If this house of
mine is run eight months of the year for you, why shouldn't it be run four
months of the year for her?" But she said only: "Too bad! It's just a
shame."
For physically, she got tired of it herself. Thank Heaven the rush
which had been accumulating for weeks would be over this evening! It
was an added misfortune that the old friend visiting in Elgin had 'phoned
that Emily must come to see her this very afternoon, or miss her
altogether. So here she and Martha, in the midst of the preparations, were
slipping across counties together, as if distance was nothing. And truly to
Martha Kenworthy it was nothing worth raising an eyelash excitedly
about. They slipped silently by cornfields, with straight little lines of
green checking away geometrically for level miles. They slipped by
alfalfa-green fields, clover-green fields, oat-green fields, wheat-green
fields, farmhouses, high loads of balancing hay, milk trucks. The sun was
hot. The air was clear. The sky was blue. And on the horizon
magnificently distant, beyond those subtle sloping fields, rose towering
white and blooming higher, in puff upon puff and fold upon fold, huge
white culminating clouds of dreams. Emily, lulled almost to
unconsciousness, saw a black one rising ominously among them.
*********
Martha looked.
"We should worry!" she replied. She was right, of course. Nothing
less than an earthquake could spoil the climax of the women's triumph
now.
Life had collapsed then. Just collapsed. It had no content at all. She
had come to realize that most of the years of her married life had been
given their value by her love of her first lover, her husband's brother.
From the day he took his departure from town until the next time he
came to see his mother, she had lived in anticipation of the days when he
would be about the house, "jollying" in his charming way, his frail and
doting mother, and playing about with Martha, and every minute, under
his discreet and brotherly words, loving her, the girl he had so incredibly
missed marrying. There had been for her then that certainty, and besides
that, some place in the depth of her mind a vague, foolish, romantic,
unacknowledged hope of some time, some place, loving him altogether.
She had to believe that that little hope had been the mainspring of her
life. For, after his death, without it, she couldn't go on, she had thought
desperately. Life had stopped.
And just then that woman, Mrs. Benton, who had lived in the next
block for years, suddenly strode into Emily's consciousness, in the same
way that a few years before she had landed with a running jump in the
defenseless mind of the community. Mrs. Benton had had an only
daughter who had been drowned. She had brooded over the fact for a
while, and then risen and said she was going to have every child in that
inland town taught to swim. As a memorial to that daughter she would
make the town a swimming beach. She had bought a wooded stretch of
the river bank. She had dammed the river. She had made a great dark
bottomless swimming place for the strong lads, and little clear wading
pools for the toddlers. She had made sunny diving places and shady
diving places and steep gravel banks and grassy inclines, and dressing
rooms of varieties. And all summer she stationed guards there and
instructors, and got Johnnie Weismuller to come down to her yearly
water festivals, to do his stunts and encourage the winners of all the
water races. It was impossible to imagine a swimming beach more
skillfully managed. The Rotarians had to acknowledge that the beach
was the town's best booster. Who could deny that farmers came now to
trade in that town, with their Fords and their Cadillacs packed full of
eager bathing suits who had been kept in order the whole week by the
promise of a swim on Saturday?
After that, she had gone on to improve the city and ruin the temper of
the taxpayers. She had built and she had paved and she had investigated,
she had reformed and she had tested laws, and she had hoisted taxes.
Men said horrid things about Mrs. Benton. They said, "she was out to
raise municipal hell," and that she was "just too damned efficient to
live." And when a small boy, a mere little unconsidered Hicks child,
quarreling with his playmate, cried, "You needn't think you can go
Bentoning around my back yard," they took up the verb derisively and
put it into all the male mouths of the county, where it lives to this day.
If the council wouldn't accept it, very well. The women's club would
build it to suit itself, would manage it, and endow it. And through four
years of opposition and complications they had worked steadily on,
straight to the dedication of the hall which now, full of the morning
delphiniums, waited for its evening christening. And Emily was very
tired.
For Mrs. Benton was clever enough to realize her own weaknesses,
and in launching the dancing-center plan she had felt the need of some
one to pour oil on the waters she troubled. And there was Emily
Kenworthy, just at hand, who was, as Johnnie Benton said, a "natural
born oil-can," an easy-going woman who got along with anyone, even
that cranky old servant that bossed her around. So Mrs. Benton had
pounced upon Emily. And Emily had submitted, with misgivings,
welcoming any relief from the vacancy of life she had suffered since
Jim's death. The strife of it all was nothing to Emily. She had never
found stimulus in overcoming opposition. She had no respect for
committees, no interest in rules of order. Blue prints made her yawn, and
the very idea of signing her name to a contract oppressed her. From the
first she had seen the project merely as a toy for Martha, a patch of
sunlight in her daughter's background. It had been only her interest in
Martha and all those children about her that had kept Emily working
away these five years, while one woman after another had resigned in
fury.
Emily had been so unhappy as a child that her mind enjoyed playing
with the idea of a beautiful gathering-place all lighted and shining by a
multitude of happy boys and girls. She had always liked the children
who played about with Martha. And since that summer during the war,
when Jim's son, that dear, befuddled, tragic Bronson, had carried the
burden of his unnecessary sorrow all those weeks unsuspected beneath
her very eyes, she had never passed a half-grown lad on the street
without a second wondering look at him. How could a town be stupid,
she often wondered, having in it a world esoteric, unexplored,
unimagined for the most part by adults, very jungles of young terror
hiding adolescent beds of precious ore. "How do you come to know all
the children in town?" women asked Emily more than once. "They can't
all come to see Martha." But if you're interested, you do get to know
them some way. They run errands, they deliver groceries, they come
about selling tickets to high-school plays, they spray the apple trees in
the spring, they borrow books—they just some way hang about. At least
that was Emily's explanation.
"Mother!"
"Well?"
"I was just thinking about things. Both dad and Uncle Jim lived in this
town when you were a girl, didn't they?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Why, Martha Kenworthy! What put such an idea into your head?"
"Dad puts it there, of course. It's been there for years, off and on. I
didn't tell you what was in my head, when I was a kid."
"Oh, you didn't, didn't you?" The idea of her saying that!
"Well, I didn't. I've often wondered about it. I told Maggie once I
liked Uncle Jim most, and she said bad little girls who said things like
that died in their sleep. It seems to me—of course I was just a little kid
then—some way, I had sort of an affinity for Uncle Jim. Funny you
never had. I wonder sometimes—— Do you suppose if he was living
now I would still be so crazy about him?"
"Oh, well, you know, mother, you do feel different about your
forbears when you're grown up. Dad didn't used to seem—so—odious
when I was a kid."
"I don't see why. Maybe Uncle Jim would have bored me just as
much. Of course you always taught me to love dad when I was little. I
simply had to, you might say. You used to say he never had any time to
play with me. But when you come to think of it, he had loads more time
than ever Uncle Jim did. He was only here sometimes, when he came to
see grandma. But some way, when I look back at it, it seems as if he
played with me for years, almost."
"I asked you, in the first place, why you didn't marry him instead of
father. You would have if you'd consulted me about it, all right. I bet I
wasn't more than eight when I began to think about that. He wouldn't
have been always jawing me every time I came in sight."
"Why, child, I don't know, exactly. He was older than I was—a little
bit. What you remember of him—all his ways of playing with you—
wouldn't necessarily make a girl prefer him. You don't ever think what
sort of fathers these lads would make for children, do you? These boys
that play about with you."
"Well, I should say I do! I'm going to have a first-class father for my
children!" This was what Emily delighted in, Martha's frank way of
discussing things unembarrassed with her. There was never a grown
woman she could have said a thing like that to when she was a girl! "If
anybody asks me to marry him," Martha continued—-"I don't mean like
Johnnie and these boys—I mean in earnest——"
"Oh, you know, mother. They'd ask anybody just to try it. Johnnie's
got to practice on someone——
"Oh, well, the risk would be all her own," Martha said, serenely. "If
anybody asked me seriously, I'd say to him: 'Let me hear you sing
backwards. Let me see you go upstairs rabbit and come down alligator.'
And if he couldn't play games nicely, like Uncle Jim, I'd say there's
nothing doing."
"I'm glad to hear it," she said railingly. And then she added: "You'll
wait a long time before you come across one like him. There isn't one in
a million."
"I should have thought you would just love him, mother!"
"Anybody could see they did. They're very much alike. Martha, you
don't do your father justice. You wait till you get into trouble and you'll
see whether he's a good friend or not."
"I know that. You say that whenever you don't want to acknowledge
I've hit the nail on the head."
"Isn't life too funny?" thought Emily. "Jim's boy has spoiled Bob for
Martha, and Jim makes Bob seem uninteresting to Martha. Things go too
much in circles in the family," she thought to herself. And Emily sat
there, not listening closely to Martha's chatter. She was thinking about
her startling question. Could Martha really have wondered about that
when she was eight? What was the use of imagining one saw into a
child's mind! Had the child ever seen things on the face of her uncle or
her mother that had made her wonder things she didn't yet dare to ask
about? After all, Martha had been twelve when Jim died. An hour before
Emily would have laughed at such an idea. And after all, suppose the
child did understand! If she did, she understood nothing dishonorable—
nothing a girl nowadays might not meditate upon.
For girls nowadays—well, Bob the other night came into the dining
room declaring violently he couldn't sit on the veranda with them. That
Ellis girl had been saying—and Johnnie was there, and that beach guard
he runs about with—she had said right in front of those men that she had
to dramatize some part of the Bible next fall term, and she had chosen
the fall of Jericho because of the harlot in it. And Martha had said,
"Goodness! You can find a story with more than one harlot in it. Can't
she, Johnnie?" And Johnnie had had the decency to say he didn't know.
He hadn't been to Sunday school for a long time. Emily had been sure
Martha had done it simply to shock Bob. She defended the girls. "I don't
care what you say, Bob. It's a lot better than the way I was brought up.
It's just a good thing that they talk so frankly with me about such things."
And yet—once in a while—she had misgivings—not so much about
Martha, of course—who was a good child—but about Eve, for instance,
and other girls.
Chapter Two
"You go right over to the hall," Emily had said to Martha as they
arrived home after five, "and I'll do your shoulder straps for you." She
had gone upstairs, and presently hurried, in a comfortable mature way, to
Martha's room. She opened the door, and almost blinked, for the
uncompromising afternoon sun made even yet a startling welter of the
purples and greens and creamy yellows before her. And then she said:
"Oh! You here, Eve?" For in that whirl of gaudiness an auburn-haired,
hawk-nosed, thin-faced girl sat in flesh-colored B.V.D.'s, on a black
stool, with a dishpan half full of pitted cherries on the floor beside her,
and in her lap a green bowl half full of moist seeds.
"I got tired of hanging around over there. I wasn't doing anything.
They're just fooling around for somebody to come and make them get to
work." It was no concession to Emily's sense of propriety that made her
hitch a fallen shoulder strap into decorum. Eve could have pitted cherries
in Martha's sitting room stark naked with serenity. She had gone into
shrieks of laughter the other day when Emily had described the careful
way in which she in her girlhood, in her own room, with no man in the
house, had put her arms into her wrapper in her bed, and had the
essential garment all ready to pull about her as soon as she had put her
first foot on the floor.
Emily said to her now, "You needn't have done those cherries, Eve."
"Oh! Is HE here?"
"Well, he's always got scholarships. He's earned his way, really,
through college."
"Barber. You know that shop all plate glass and shining enamel that
makes all the rest of the street look dirty? That's his shop. That's where
we go for shampoos."
Eve had been looking at Emily curiously, and the little grin had grown
into a spreading smile.
"You're the limit, Mrs. Kenworthy!" she said, admiringly. Then she
saw Emily's purpose in coming, and got up. She stretched up an arm,
spread her dripping fingers gingerly apart, and brushed back her hair
with the inside of her elbow. "I'll do those straps. I've almost finished.
Wait a minute." And she started, apparently, towards the bathroom.
"It's almost supper time. Bob may be home any time now."
She laughed and said, "Eve, you really ought to have a thicker
dressing gown!"
"I have got one," Eve assured her. "I had to get one. Dad wouldn't go
on the Pullman with me till he saw I had one. I hate a lot of cotton
flannels."
"I know it. But it's sort of dowdy—crêpe de Chine. Put Martha's on
me. I'll bring my own Victorian down to-morrow."
"Oh, that girl is as good as gold, Bob. They all wear thin things in the
halls, Martha says." Emily liked her. To be sure, the ease with which she
had taken up her permanent abode at the Kenworthys' was somewhat—
nonplusing. Emily had asked her, when Martha first brought her home,
where she had been brought up. And she had said: "Oh, I never was
brought up at all. I'm just the little prairie flower, growing wilder every
hour. Just hauled about from aunt to boarding-school—between the devil
and the deep sea all my tender days." Though she had said it so frankly,
so seriously, Emily had thought it scarcely sufficient. But Martha had
hooted at Emily's quizzings. "It's too funny the way you act, mother, as if
maybe she wasn't fit to associate with your precious child. At school I'm
simply nothing. I'm the least worm in the apple. But Eve's everything.
The profs just eat out of her hands. She's chairman of the student council
—you know—the gang that makes us all behave. She edits the magazine,
and she'll be president of her class next year, as like as not. At school
everybody wants to get a stand in with Eve. She'd never looked at me if
her dad hadn't moved to this town. And now you don't know whether I
better make her acquaintance or not!"
"You know I didn't mean that, child. I simply asked who she was and
where she had lived. That's only natural. I think she's a dear."
And Emily had been reassured because it was her theory that women
never again have such a capacity for judging one another rightly, and
choosing friends wisely, as they have in college. No girl, she thought,
looking at Eve's thin, rather over-bred face, fools a campusful of her
companions. Bob said her father was always well spoken of. No one
knew him very well. He had bought a great elevator in town some time
ago, one of several he had in the state, and recently had bought a large
old house and settled his family in it. That had consisted of his old
bedridden mother and her nurse—until Eve's vacation had begun. Martha
had gone at once to see her there, and, coming back, had said to Emily:
"It's a funny sort of house, mother. It's furnished all right, and everything.
But it looks like an orphan asylum." She had asked Eve to come and stay
the night, and Eve had accepted gladly. Her grandmother, she told Emily,
had been "out of her head, mildly" for months. Her nurses weren't very
easy to get along with. "Dad had a hard enough time getting any he can
trust grandma to," she had said, very sensibly. "He's away so much.
These two are awfully good to her. I'll say that for them. They're sisters.
So why should I come home for three months and ball everything up? I
just keep still as a mouse and let them have their own way. Grandma
never knows me. I never go into the room."
Well, that was a nice sort of place for a young girl to spend her
holiday, Emily had thought. "Stay with us," she had suggested. And she
hadn't had to suggest it twice. Bob grumbled every day about this steady
boarder, but that didn't excite Emily unduly. She liked Eve better and
better. How sweet of her now, to think of doing those cherries! She was
always doing little things that Martha would never have thought of.
Bob couldn't get over that scene. Eve had sprung up and hugged him
and kissed him and patted him. Emily, seeing even that greeting, would
have been sure that Eve's rather shocking sophistication was only a pose.
For she had started at once to get her things together to go home with
him. And when Johnnie Benton had protested she had turned to him
indignantly. "I like your nerve!" she had cried to him. "Do you suppose
I'm going to a dance with you when I haven't seen my dad for six
weeks?" And she wouldn't go. They couldn't persuade her. Bob, sitting
there, had seen her father relishing the situation. The man obviously
overflowed with pride in his "Evelyn."
"Now, can you beat that?" Bob had demanded of Emily afterwards.
"Can you imagine Martha cutting a dance for me? Maybe Eve'll do her
some good. Can you beat that?"
"Oh, well, Bob, that's another matter. It was sweet, the way she did it.
But Eve hadn't seen him for weeks. And then, she hasn't got a mother.
She's had to depend on him always. It's much more normal, I must say,
for a girl to prefer a dance to her parents. You can't deny that."
"I know it. But it's the principle of the thing." And he had liked Eve,
till he had met her coming from the bathroom in what he called, "an
obscene Mother Hubbard."
And now, getting ready for supper, Emily wished she knew why Eve
had, once, mentioned father-in-law in connection with Wilton. Bob
would have laughed at her, if he had known, for she thought every man
in town was in love with Martha, he said. A fat chance she had of getting
near her as hard-headed a man as Wilton. He had too much sense to fall
for any such kid as Martha, Bob had assured her. But how could she help
thinking about it when Wilton's father had told her that he absolutely
refused to leave his hospital work to come home for any dance? He was
interned already, by what he called a streak of luck, but Emily knew it
was rather his ability. And now he was coming out to see Martha—and
his father was a barber. How could a mother help thinking about her
child's matrimonial possibilities, a lovely girl of that age? "When I was
her age," thought Emily, "I fell in love with Jim." And it was because she
had been thinking of the possibility, any time now, of Martha's marriage,
that she had tolerated the painted room.
One thing Emily Kenworthy was sure of. She had almost gritted her
teeth in the intensity of her resolutions on this subject for years,
whenever she had had to think over the surprising course of her own life.
She had married really to get out of this very house, made intolerable to
her by the tyranny of her aunt. But her daughter wouldn't ever marry to
get away from her. She would never marry for freedom! Not while Emily
Kenworthy knew what she was doing! Emily had few strong convictions,
but that one was unalterable.
Emily loved every meal when Martha was home. That evening at
supper she sat cherishing her enjoyment. Afterwards it was so amusing
to be running in and out of the painted room, where Eve and Martha
were dressing. No sooner had they gone up to dress, ready for the
evening, than Martha called to her from the bathroom, above the noise of
water steaming into the tub:
"Mother!"