Pelham was wholly under the spell of Mary's idealistic phrases, her sugary circumlocutions and romantic evasions of annoying facts. She had found it impossible to meet Paul's brutal logic with her ill-trained feminine inconsecutiveness; the course she took was an acceptance couched in some inoffensive generality or platitude, with a sentimentalized deity as authority for her stand. Paul pierced through the unmeaning glamor; but the children did not. When things went smashing, contrary to her plans and wishes, somehow God willed it ... a convenient, kindly-disposed arranger, unless Paul's vigorous planning took precedence. Her thirty-nine connubial articles could be summed up in one: Paul could not be wrong, in the children's eyes; her wifely duty bound her to wholesale support, even of his errors or occasional unfairnesses. "He is your father, remember," blanketed everything. "God only knows how much I love you," was her unfruitful solace to them. And she did love them, and gave of her best for them, except where fealty to Paul, who came immovably first, intervened. This prayer of hers for the son's purity continued to ward off the imperative temptations that nearness to Dorothy, or thoughts of Butler's Avenue, spread around him. It fell on his ears now with all of the old power. He sat, rubbing her hand against his cheek, staring off to the distant vagueness that was Shadow Mountain. The dun clouds along the horizon had obscured its outline; the sky to the south was a sickly copper. Above it pulsed and banded a tumult of smoke gray clouds; the eastern horizon was a slate blue, rapidly darkening. A far rumble of muttered thunder was followed by the vivid glare of sheet lightning, which brought into sharp relief the serrated crest of the distant hills. Suddenly out of the dull sky came a quick spatter of big drops. She slipped from her son's embrace, and went in to see to windows and doors. He moved a lazy flanneled leg further from the edge of the porch, where the splashing drops bounced inward. There was a short lull. He rose, as a white tongue of fire forked its way toward the near summit of Shadow Mountain, followed immediately by a deafening pattering rattle of thunder. Hurrying in from the front porch, his mother met him, a strained look in her eyes. "There's a storm coming, Pell. Your father's on the way home. I hope it doesn't catch him." Pelham moved idly into the library. Out of the side window he could see the approaching wall of misty rain, blotting out the familiar outlines of trees, the negro cottage beyond the spring depression, the spring buildings, the outhouses. How quiet, how unerring and irresistible its course! The marching fusillade of drops touched the side of the barn, and darkened it ominously: from a soft gray it shaded swiftly to a rain-drenched black. Now it menaced the house itself; now the impartial advance of the shrapnel, in slanting crystal lines, brought the house beneath its unrelenting fire.