Luke sold The Saturday Evening Post, and peddled hot dogs and toy balloons—and you got up at three o’clock, carried the morning paper—and they let Ben go to hell until his lungs were gone and it was too late—and you see what it all comes to in the end, don’t you?… It’s all given away to real-estate men or thrown away for motor cars they never use. I’ve given up worrying,” she said. “I don’t think about it any more…. They don’t change,” she muttered. “I used to think they did, but now I know they don’t. Uh-uh! They don’t change!… Well, forget about it,” and she turned wearily away.
The year Eliza bought the car, Eugene was eighteen years old and was a Junior at the State University. When he came home that year he asked her if she would let him learn to drive it. It was about the time when everyone in town was beginning to own motor cars. When he walked up town everyone he knew would drive by him in a car. Everyone on earth was beginning to live upon a wheel. Somehow it gave him a naked and desolate feeling, as if he had nowhere to go and no door to enter. When he asked her if she would let him take the car out and learn to drive it, she had looked at him a moment with her hands clasped loosely at the waist, her head cocked quizzically to one side, and the little tremulous and bantering smile that had always filled him with such choking exasperation and wordless shame, and somehow with a nameless and intolerable pity, too, because behind it he felt always her high white forehead and her faded, weak, and childlike eyes, the naked intelligence, whiteness, and immortal innocence of the child that was looking straight through the mask of years with all the deathless hope and faith and confidence of her life and character.
Now, for the last time, he asked her again the question he had asked with such an earnest hope so many times before. And instantly, as if he had dreamed her answer, she replied—the same reply that she had always made, the only reply the invincible procrastination of her soul could make.
“Hm!” she said, making the bantering and humming noise in her throat as she looked at him. “Wha-a-a-t! Why, you’re my ba-a-a-by!” she said with jesting earnestness, as she laid her strong worn hand loosely on his shoulder. “No, sir!” she said quickly and quietly, shaking her head in a swift sideways movement. “I’d be afra-a-id, afraid,” she whispered.
“Mama, afraid of what?”
“Why, child,” she said gravely, “I’d be afraid you’d go and hurt yourself. Uh-
