CHAPTER IV


On July 3, the Marvelous Son was born, and never was there such a
father. Even the trained nurse, hardened to new fathers by years of
experience, admitted that she never had seen any one take parenthood
quite so hard. Four times in the night he crept in to see if the baby
was surely breathing. We were in a very quiet neighborhood, yet the next
day, being Fourth of July, now and then a pop would be heard. At each
report of a cap-pistol a block away, Carl would dash out and vehemently
protest to a group of scornful youngsters that they would wake our son.
As if a one-day-old baby would seriously consider waking if a giant
fire-cracker went off under his bed!

Those were magic days. Three of us in the family instead of two--and
separations harder than ever. Once in all the ten and a half years we
were married I saw Carl Parker downright discouraged over his own
affairs, and that was the day I met him down town in Oakland and he
announced that he just could not stand the bond business any longer. He
had come to dislike it heartily as a business; and then, leaving the boy
and me was not worth the whole financial world put together. Since his
European experience,--meeting the Webbs and their kind,--he had had a
hankering for University work, but he felt that the money return was so
small he simply could not contemplate raising a family on it. But now we
were desperate. We longed for a life that would give us the maximum
chance to be together. Cold-bloodedly we decided that University work
would give us that opportunity, and the long vacations would give us our