But now, Luke, seeing her, as she stood planted there in all-engulfing rumination, thrust his hands distractedly through his shining hair again, and cried to her with exasperated entreaty:
“W-w-w-wy, Mama, if you please! I b-b-b-beg of you and beseech you, if you please!”
“I’m ready!” Eliza cried, starting and turning from her powerful contemplation of her house. “This very minute, sir! Come on!”
“Wy, if you p-p-p-please!” he muttered, thrusting at his hair.
They walked towards his car, which he had halted in the alley-way beside the house. A few leaves, sere and yellow, from the maples in the yard were drifting slowly to the ground.
XLI
During all that time, when he was waiting with a desperate hope that rose each day to the frenzy of a madman’s certitude, and sank each day to the abyss of his despair, for the magic letter which was coming to him from the city, and which would instantly give him all the fortune, fame, and triumph for which his soul was panting, his family looked at him with troubled question in their eyes. His enthusiastic hopes and assurances of the great success that he would have from writing plays seemed visionary and remote to them. Perhaps they were right about this, although the reason that they had for thinking so was wrong.
Thus, although they said little to Eugene at this time about his plans for the future, and what they did say was meant to hearten him, their doubt and disbelief were evident, and sometimes when he came into the house he could hear them talking in a troubled way about him.
“Mama,” he heard his sister say one day, as she sat talking with his mother in the kitchen, “what does Gene intend to do? Have you heard him say yet?”
“Why, no-o-o!” his mother answered slowly, in a puzzled and meditative tone. “He hasn’t said. At least he says he’s goin’to write plays, —of course, I reckon he’s waiting to hear from those people in New York about that play he’s written,” she added quickly.
“Well, I know,” his sister answered wearily. “That’s all very fine—if he can do it. But, good heavens, Mama!” she cried furiously—“you can’t live on hope like that! Gene’s only one out of a million! Can’t you realize that?—Why, they used to think I had some talent as a singer”—here she laughed ironically, a husky high falsetto, “I used to think so myself—but
