You forget about it,” she said quietly and wearily. “It all seems wonderful to you, and you think that you can’t live without it, but you forget about it. Oh, of course you will!” she muttered, “of course! Why!” she cried, shaking Eugene furiously, and now her voice had its old hearty and commanding ring, “I’m going to beat you if you act like this! What if they don’t take your play! I’ll bet that has happened to plenty of people—Yes, sir!” she cried. “I’ll bet that has happened to all of them when they started out—and then they went on and made a big success of it later! Why, if those people didn’t take my play,” she said, “I’d sit down and write another one so good they’d be ashamed of themselves! Why, you’re only a kid yet!” she cried furiously, shaking Eugene, and frowning fiercely but with her tongue stuck out a little and a kind of grin on her big-boned liberal-looking face. “Don’t you know that! You’ve got loads of time yet! Your life’s ahead of you! Of course you will! Of course you will!” she cried, shaking him. “Don’t let a thing like this get you down! In ten years’time you’ll look back on all this and laugh to think you were ever such a fool! Of course you will!”—and then as her husband, who had driven up before their mother’s house, now sounded on the horn for her, she said again, in the quiet and weary tone: “Well, Gene, forget about it! Life’s too short! I know,” she said mysteriously, “I know!”
Then, as she started to go, she added casually: “Honey, come on over for supper, if you want to.—Now it’s up to you. You can suit yourself!—You can do exactly as you please,” she said in the almost hard, deliberately indifferent tone with which she usually accompanied these invitations:
“What would you like to eat?” she now said meditatively. “How about a nice thick steak?” she said juicily, as she winked at him. “I’ve got the whole half of a fried chicken left over from last night, that you can have if you come over!—Now it’s up to you!” she cried out again in that almost hard challenging tone, as if he had shown signs of unwillingness or refusal. “I’m not going to urge you, but you’re welcome to it if you want to come.—How about a big dish full of string beans—some mashed potatoes—some stewed corn, and asparagus? How’d you like some great big wonderful sliced tomatoes with mayonnaise?—I’ve got a big deep peach and apple pie in the oven—do you think that’d go good smoking hot with a piece of butter and a hunk of American cheese?” she said, winking at him and smacking her lips comically. “Would that hit the spot? Hey?” she said, prodding him in the ribs with her big stiff
