"How about looking after us?" inquired Jim, alarmed.
"Dad, if my being here is going to make _you_ more comfortable," she said, "I’ll remain. Really, I am serious. Don’t you want me to go?"
"Mentally," she replied, with a defiant glance at Jim.
"This will be a gay place to live in if _you_ go off for four years!" remarked that young man.
"You don’t mean that _you’d_ miss me!" she exclaimed mockingly.
"Miss the mental stimulus I give you?"—sweetly persuasive.
"Not at all. I’d miss the mental relaxation you afford my tired brain——"
"You beast! Dad, I’m _going_! And some day your son will find out that it’s an _idle_ mind that makes a girl restless; not a restless mind that makes her idle!"
"I know it." She smiled at the young fellow, but her grey eyes were brilliant. Then she turned and nestled against John Cleland: "I have made up my mind, darling, and I have decided to go to Vassar."
Home, to John Cleland and his son, had come to mean Stephanie as much as everything else under the common roof-tree.
For the background of familiar things framed her so naturally and so convincingly and seemed so obviously devised for her in this mellow old household, where everything had its particular place in an orderly ensemble, that when she actually departed for college, the routine became dislocated, jarring everything above and below stairs, and leaving two dismayed and extremely restless men.
"Steve’s going off like this has put the whole house on the blink," protested Jim, intensely surprised to discover the fact.
It nearly finished Janet, whose voice, long afflicted with the cracked tremolo of age, now became almost incoherent at the very mention of Stephanie’s name.
Old Lizzie, the laundress, deeply disapproving of Stephanie’s departure, insisted on doing her linen and sheer fabrics, and sending a hamper once a week to Poughkeepsie. Every week, also, Amanda, the cook, dispatched cardboard boxes Vassarward, containing condiments and culinary creations which she stubbornly refused to allow Cleland Senior to censor.
"Ay t’ank a leetle yelly-cake and a leetle yar of yam it will not hurt Miss Stephanie," she explained to Cleland. And he said no more.
As for Meacham, he prowled noiselessly about his duties, little, shrunken, round-shouldered, as though no dislocation in the family circle had occurred; but every day since her departure, at Stephanie’s place a fresh flower of some sort lay on the cloth to match the other blossom opposite.