Nevertheless, it was only in his presence that she lost her red sense of shame, and though she still walked nobly, looked with clear eyes, and carried a high head, she fancied herself bent by broken pride, blinded and dusty-haired. Zebedee's books helped her to blot out that vision of herself and the other of Mildred Caniper still sitting by the fire and refusing the fulness of the sun. What she read amazed her with its profundity and amused her with its inconclusiveness. She had an awed pity for men whose lives were occupied in these endless questionings, and while Mildred idly turned the pages of periodicals she once had scorned, Helen frowned and bit her lips over the problems of the ages. They gave her and Zebedee something impersonal to talk of when he came on his weekly visit. "It's no good telling me," she warned him firmly, "that my poplars are not really there. I can feel them and see them and hear them--always hear them. If they weren't there, they would be! If I exist, so do they." "Quite so. You're doing very well. I told you the medicine would turn to food." "It's not food. What is it that nasty people chew? Gum? Yes, chewing-gum. It keeps me going. I mean--" He helped her over that abyss. "It's a most improper name for wisdom." "This isn't wisdom. Wisdom is just going on--and--keeping the world clean." "Then," he said slowly, "you may count among the sages." They stood together by the schoolroom window and watched the windy sunshine darting among the laurel bushes and brightening the brass on the harness of the patient horse outside the gate. "I wonder," Helen said, speaking as if she were not quite awake, "whether Mr. Pinderwell ever read philosophy." "No," Zebedee answered in the same tones; "he took to wood-carving." This time she leapt the abyss unaided and with a laugh. "But then, he never had a stepmother nodding beside the fire. What is going to happen to her?" "She has very little strength." "But she isn't going to die?" "Not yet, I think, dear." The word slipped from him, and they both listened to its echoes. "I wish you'd go," she whispered. "I'm going." He did not hesitate at the door or he would have seen her drop into a chair and let her limp arms slide across the table as she let out a noisy sob of happiness because his friendliness was still only a cloak that could sometimes be lifted to show the man beneath. Almost gaily, she went to Mildred Caniper's room. "Zebedee stayed a long time today. I could hear you talking." "Yes." "Isn't he busy now?" "He works all day and half the night." "Oh." Mildred's twisted face regained a semblance of its old expression and her voice some of its precision. "Then you ought to be looking after him." "I can't manage both of you." "No, but Mrs. Samson could look after me." The words were slovenly again; the face changed subtly as sand changes under water. It became soft and indefinite and yielding, betraying the slackening of the mind.