The European project had to be abandoned. Josiah could not leave his affairs for so prolonged a journey. And Sarah declined to leave Marsden. Beside, Rhoda and Jonas who were its instigators, had their doubts as to the pleasure of a jaunt in Europe with their mother as guide. And they were right. Sarah’s training and life in Harriet were scarce such as to have fitted her for Paris and Berlin, even if the comfortable aid of Cook’s had been invoked--as Josiah had suggested. So a short run out West with a peep-in on Yellowstone Park was arranged by way of compensation. Sarah and Marsden remained behind in Harriet for the last months. Workmen and decorators had full swing in a broad, brown-stone house near Central Park on the West side of Manhattan. And meantime, Josiah, who needed at any rate to visit his property near Red Bear and to confer with his promoters in Helena, Butte and Billings, made ready to take his two daughters and two sons along. The preparation on his part consisted in the booking of two compartments to Chicago and thence West. For the children, it meant the buying of clothes, valises, toilet articles, and descriptive literature. There was much bustle, much serious discussion, less anticipation than sheer worry. And in all this, Quincy’s part was passive, disaffected. He knew that he was going along because his mother had insisted that he was not too young to enjoy geysers. He should greatly have preferred to remain at home, considering the trip’s company and the air of fevered preparation that made it from the outset ominous. But Sarah had nursed the fond illusion that by including him in the arrangement he would become automatically one, in all its myriad, impromptu reckonings, with the family life whence she was wise enough to feel his past exclusion. Sarah, then, was sponsor of the child’s forced participation in the trip. Sarah, as so often before, was clumsily in error. But the serious element of this lay not in her mistake, not in the needless discomfort that her mistake brought on Quincy. It lay in the circumstance of Quincy’s knowing just these things, of his knowing how they and their like bore on his life. For Quincy was coming fatalistically, stoically, to adjudge his mother, to recognize her failures and to accept her in their shadow.