Mother didn't know of his mental struggles. She was thinking more about her feet. She looked up with mild astonishment when, as they left the town by the highroad southward, Father burst out, "I'll play if I want to, but I can't stand the gawping gumps here." "Why, Father!" she said, trustingly. The noontime sun came out. To conceal from his stomach the fact that it was hungry, Father grew boyishly enthusiastic about going Southward. "Gee!" he burbled, "we'll hit down toward Florida--palms and alligators and--and everything--Land of Flowers! What's this hotel?--the Royal Points de Anna? Play the mouth-organ there. Make a hit. Then we'll strike New Orleans and jump to San Francisco.... Gee! it's a long way between houses along here!" They approached a farm-yard. Father was tremendously urging himself to play the mouth-organ there, to skip and be nimble, and gain a minstrel's meed. Meaning lunch. Frowning with intentness, he stopped before the house. Mother meekly halted beside him. She had not lost quite all of the training in self-dependence she had got from a business life, these last weeks, but she looked to him for leadership in the new existence. Father swung his shapeless pack from his shoulders, set it down on the ground, reluctantly drew his mouth-organ from its case. He became aware that a large, astonished woman was staring from the kitchen window. He stared back. The mouth-organ was left suspended in air. Hastily he stuck it in his pocket and, as though hypnotized, moved toward the kitchen door. He had to give the woman some explanation for encamping in her yard.... Why! She might have thought that he had intended to make a fool of himself by playing the mouth-organ there! The woman opened the door curiously, stared over Father's head at Mother, then back at the little man with his pink, cheery face and whiff of delicate silver hair. "I--uh--I-- Could I cut some wood or something for you?" said Father. "Mrs.--uh--Mrs. Smith and I are tramping across the United States--San Francisco and New Orleans and so on--and--" "Why, you poor things, you must be terribly cold and tired! Think of it! San Francisco! You tell Mrs. Smith to come right in and warm herself by the fire, and I guess I can find some dinner for both of you." Father scuttled out, informed Mother that she had become Mrs. Smith, and before her slightly dazed mind could grasp it all she was in at a kitchen table near the stove, and eating doughnuts, salt pork, beans, apple pie, and vast cups of coffee. Not but that Father himself was also laying in the food with a lustiness that justified his lumberjack's blue-flannel shirt. From time to time he dutifully mentioned his project of cutting wood, but the woman was more interested in him as a symbol. In a dim, quite unanalytic way Father perceived that, to this woman, this drab prisoner of kitchen and woodshed, it was wonderful to meet a man and woman who had actually started for--anywhere.