“That’s right! Pick on me!” Momma moaned, taking unfair refuge in cowardly tears. “But I notice nobody is offering to go to New York with me.” Hattie spoke first. “I’d go in a minute if I could leave the children, but with little Eddie having his tonsils removed to-morrow and Fannie’s chicken pox just coming out--” Poppa sighed. “I’ll go, of course, if you want me to.” Momma saw the reluctance in his assent, and, though she knew that he had some strong business reason behind it, her cantankerous mood took umbrage at it. “What’d I tell you? Well, I will go. I’ll go all by myself, to some lonely old hotel, and if I never come back nobody will know the difference.” “Of course you shan’t go by yourself, honey,” Poppa protested. “I was only thinkin’ that if I could go home for a while I could set my business to rights and prob’ly close up a big deal I had on when I got Hattie’s wire. If I was to put that through, it would net me a couple o’ thousand, and that would go a long ways toward paying for your operation, most likely; and then I could come on and be with you whilst you was convalescing; and then, if anything was to happen to me, the business would be all right and I’d leave you and the children fixed.” This was the simple, humble statement of his mind in the matter; that solemn devotion to his work that makes a priestcraft and an art of business. Like all successful creators, he consecrated himself to his work and sacrificed himself to its completion. No poet or sculptor could have a holier or purer ambition for perfection and a flawless conclusion, and there was no more thought of selfishness or greed. Momma understood and loved him, but the disease in her soul took offense at everything; and, though she realized the unselfishness of his motive, she took a perverse delight in distorting it. Then ensued one of those duels in which each took the wrong side with a kind of devoted insincerity. Poppa frantically declared that he would go and nothing should stop him, and she as frantically declared that if he went she wouldn’t. Momma insisted that she hadn’t a friend on earth or in New York, and she would rather go back and die in her own bed than die alone in New York. This reminded her distraught husband that she did have a friend in New York, her old playmate, Ella Jemison, who had married Sam Killip and gone to New York and fortune. “Oh, yes, I’m likely to ask rich folks like her to take me in!” Momma sobbed. “She wouldn’t look at me. She’s forgotten she ever knew me, though we are kind of second cousins by marriage.” “Well, her husband hasn’t forgot he ever knew me,” Poppa snapped. “Didn’t I have a letter from him only the other day, and didn’t he say his wife asked to be kindly remembered to you?” “Sam Killip wrote to you!” Momma cried. “How’d rich folks like him come to write to you?”