Here it was again, creeping through him after all these placid years with Mazie--the same sullen apprehension, dull unease verging on anger, invading his peace of mind, stirred this time by Fanny’s child--Eris, daughter of Discord. “Dang Fanny’s breed,” he muttered, entering the house, “--we allus was enemies deep down, ... deep down in the flesh....” All at once he understood his real mind. Eris had always been Fanny’s child. Never his. He remembered what Fanny had said to him at the approach of death--how, in that last desperate moment the battered mask of years had slipped from her bony visage and he had gazed into the stark face of immemorial antipathy, ... the measureless resentment of a sex. Fanny was dead. May God find out what she wants and give it to her. But Fanny’s race persisted. She lived again in Eris. He was face to face with it again.... After twenty years of peace!... He went to the foot of the stairs and called to his wife. Her voice answered from the floor above. He plodded on upstairs. Mazie was standing in Eris’ room, a pile of clothing on the bed, a suitcase and a small, flat trunk open on the floor. She turned to Odell, her handsome features flushed, and the sparkle of tears in her slanting, black eyes. “What’s the trouble now?” he demanded, already divining it. “She’s gone, Elmer. She called me up on the telephone from Albany to tell me. The Crystal Fillum Company offers her a contract. She wants her clothes and her money.” A heavy colour surged through the man’s face. “That’s the danged secret blood in her,” he said. “I knowed it. There’s allus sunthin’ hatchin’ deep down in women of her blood.... She’s allus had it in her mind to quit us.... She never was one of us.... All right, let her go. I’m done with her.” Mazie began unsteadily: “So many children of--of our day seem to feel like our Eris----” “Mine don’t! My boys ain’t got nothin’ secret into them! They ain’t crazy in the head ’n’ they ain’t full o’ fool notions.” Mazie remained silent. Her sons were fuller of “notions” than their father knew. It had required all the magnetism of her affection and authority to keep them headed toward a future on Whitewater Farms. For the nearest town was already calling them; they sniffed the soft-coal smoke from afar and were restless for the iron dissonance and human bustle of paved and narrow ways. Theirs was the gregarious excitement instinct in human animals. Beyond the dingy monochrome of life they caught a glimmer of distant brightness. The vague summons of unknown but suspected pleasures stirred them as they travelled the sodden furrow. Youth’s physical instinct is to gather at the water-hole of this vast veldt we call the world, and wallow in the inviting mire of a thousand hoofs, and feel and hear and see the perpetual milling of the human herds that gather there.