J.M. did not contradict the president. He never contradicted the presidents. He outlasted them so consistently that it was not necessary. This time he took off his glasses and rubbed them on an awkwardly fashioned chamois spectacle-wiper made for him by little Molly McCartey. He noticed the pattern of the silk in his visitor's necktie and it made him think of one of Rosalie Loyette's designs. He smiled a little.
The president regarded this smiling silence with suspicion. He cocked his eye penetratingly upon his librarian. "But it is very queer, J.M., that as long as I have known you, I never heard that you _had_ any family at all."
J.M. put his clean and polished spectacles back on his nose and looked through them into the next room, where Ivan Petrofsky sat devouring his first lesson in political economy. Then he turned, beaming like an amiable sphinx upon his interrogator. "Do you know--I never realized it myself until just lately," he said.
Fields, green fields of Shining River, Lightly left too soon In the stormy equinoctial, In the hunter's moon,--
Snow-blown fields of Shining River I shall once more tread; I shall walk their crested hollows, Living or dead.
To old Mrs. Prentiss, watching apprehensively each low mountain dawn, the long, golden days of the warm autumn formed a series of blessed reprieves from the loom which hung over her. With her inherited and trained sense of reality, she could not cheat herself into forgetting, even for a moment, that her fate was certain, but, nevertheless, she took a breathless enjoyment in each day, as it passed and did not bring the dreaded change in her life. She spoke to her husband about this feeling as they sat on the front step one October evening, when the air was as mild as in late May, breaking the calm silence, in which they usually sat, by saying, "Seems as though this weather was just made for us, don't it, father?"
The old man stirred uneasily in his chair. "I dun'no'--seems sometimes to me as though I'd ruther have winter come and be done with it. If we've got to go as soon as cold weather sets in, we might as well go and have it over with. As 'tis, I keep on saying good-by in my mind to things and folks every minute, and then get up in the morning to begin it all again. This afternoon I was down the river where I saved Hiram's life when he was a little fellow--the old black whirl-hole. I got to thinking about that time, I never was real sure till then I wouldn't be a coward if it come right down _to_ it. Seems as though I'd been more of a man ever since. It's been a real comfort to me to look at that whirl-hole, and that afternoon it come over me that after this there wouldn't be a single thing any more to remind us of anything _good_ or bad, we've ever done. It'll be most as if we hadn't lived at all. I just felt as though I _couldn't_ go away from everything and everybody I've ever known down to Hiram's stuffy little flat. And yet I suppose we are real lucky to have such a good son as Hiram now the others are all gone. I dun'no' what we'd do if 'tweren't for him."