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. Then the street
lights winked and sputtered and began to glow with white brilliance.

Arizona or New Mexico or Colorado! Peter knew what the doctor had in
mind. Vast plains, unpeopled, pure, immutable in their calm; stars that
came down at night and hung just over your head, making the darkness
alive with their bright presence; a little cottage hunched against a
hill, a candle winking cheerily through the window at the stars; the
cries of night birds, the drone of insects, the distant howling of a
coyote; far away on the boundary of your possessions, a fence of barbed
wire stretching through a hollow and up over a hill; distance and quiet
and calm, be it day or night. And Helen May coming through the sunlight,
riding a gentle-eyed pony; Helen May with her deep-gold hair tousled in
the wind, and with health dancing in her eyes that were the color of a