She was clearing off the table. He heard her scraping out the potato dish with great care. Then she was coming over to him. She came awkwardly, hesitatingly--her life had not schooled her in meeting emotional moments beautifully--but she laid her hand upon him, patted him on the shoulder as one would a child. “Never mind, papa--never you mind. It will make it easier for us. There's enough left--and it will make it easier. We're getting on--we're--” There she broke off abruptly into a vigorous scolding of the dog, who was lifting covetous nostrils to a piece of meat. That was all. And there was no woman in the country had worked harder. And Martha was ambitious; she liked land, and she did not like Claus Hansen's wife. Yes, he had had a good wife. Then there was that other thing to tell her--about Fritz. That was harder. Mother had not gone up to the city to hear Fritz “speak” because her feet were bothering her, and she could not wear her shoes. He had had a vague idea of how disappointed she was, though she had said very little about it. Martha never had been one to say much about things. When he came back, of course she had wanted to know all about it, and he had put her off. Now he had to tell her. It was much harder; and in the telling of it he broke down. This time she did not come over and pat his shoulder. Perhaps Martha knew--likely she had never heard the word intuition, but, anyway, she knew--that it was beyond that. It seemed difficult for her to comprehend. She was bewildered to find that Fritz could change parties all in a minute. She seemed to grasp, first of all, that it was disrespectful to his father. Some boys at school had been putting notions into his head. But gradually she began to see it. Fritz wanted to make money. Fritz wanted to have it easier. And the other people did “have it easier.” It divided her feeling: sorry and indignant for the father, secretly glad and relieved for the boy. “He will have it easier than we had it, papa,” she said at the last. “But it was not right of Fritz,” she concluded, vaguely but severely. As she washed the dishes Martha was thinking that likely Fritz's wife would have a hired girl. Then Martha went up to bed. He said that he would come in a few minutes, but many minutes went by while he sat out on the side porch trying to think it out. The moon was shining brightly down on that hundred and sixty which Claus Hansen was to have. And the moon, too, seemed to be saying: “What's the use?” Well, what _was_ the use? Perhaps, after all, the boy was right. What had it all amounted to? What was there left? What had he done? Two Americas, Fred had said, and his but the America of the dreamers. He had always thought that he was fighting for the real. And now Fred said that he had never become an American at all.