Gray hat for Peter or bottle-green hat for Vic--what did it matter if
neither of them ever again owned a hat, if Helen May must stay here in
the city and face the doom that had been pronounced upon her? What did
anything matter, if Babe died and left him plodding along alone? Vic did
not occur to him consolingly. Vic was a responsibility; a comfort he was
not. Like many men, Peter could not seem to understand his son half as
well as he understood his daughter. He could not see why Vic should
frivol away his time; why he should have all those funny little conceits
and airs of youth; why he should lord it over Helen May who was every day
proving her efficiency and her strength of character anew. If Helen May
went the way her mother had gone, Peter felt that he would be alone, and
that life would be quite bare and bleak and empty of every incentive
toward bearing the little daily burdens of existence.
He got up with his hand going instinctively to his back to ease the ache
there, and went out upon the porch and stood looking drearily down upon
the asphalted street, where the white paths of speeding automobiles
slashed the dusk like runaway sunbeams on a frolic.
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