Then there would come the most serious times, when with the deepest thoughtfulness we would survey the years ahead and very solemnly place ourselves, our views and beliefs. Miraculous how agreed we were! We believed, we found, in good workmanship, in honest building, in getting things done. We believed in Eleanore's father and all those around and above him that could help his kind of work. We were impatient of soft-headedness in rich people who had nothing to do, and of heavy muddle-headedness in the millions who had too much to do, and of muckraking of every kind which only got in the way of the builders. For the building of a new, clean vigorous world was our religion. And it did not seem cold to us, because our lives were in it and because we were in love.
There was no end to the plans for ourselves, for my writing, our home, the friends we wanted, the trips, the books and the music. And through it all and from under it all there kept bursting up that feeling which we knew was the most important of all, the exultant realization that we two were just starting out.
When at last we came back home this feeling took a deeper turn. I noticed a change in Eleanore. She had far less thought and time for me now, she seemed to be strangely absorbed in herself. Nearly all her time and strength were given to our small apartment, in the same building as that of her father. By countless feminine touches she was making it look like the home she had planned. She was getting all in order. And then one night she told me why. Her arms were close around me and her voice was so low I could barely hear:
"There's going to be another soon--another one _of us_--do you hear?--a very tiny blessed one."
Suddenly I relaxed my hold, for I was afraid of hurting her now. In a moment all was so utterly changed. And as in that brave, quiet way of hers she looked smiling steadily into my eyes, my throat contracted sharply. For into my mind leaped the memory of what the harbor had shown to me on that sultry hideous summer night in the tenement over in Brooklyn. And _that_ must happen to _my wife_!
"Oh, my dear," she whispered, "if you only knew how much strength I stored up way over there in the mountains."