Home from the Hill by William Humphrey Page A

sir.” Then she heard him coming along the hall. She jammed her foot into the shoe and ran to her seat. He looked her way as he passed the door and gave her a sickly smile, then averted his eyes. She started up, but stifled her question. She would not ask him , not force him to confess whatever ignominy he had been put to. He passed on and she heard his foot on the stairs, a heavy humbled tread, then his feet and legs came into view and she watched them ascend out of sight.
    Her disarming, hot befuddlement abated, and, tempered by determination, she reached the door in iron control of herself. “What has happened?” she demanded, shutting the door behind her.
    He was squatting on the hearthstone, poking the low fire. He twisted about and looked up, trying to smile. “Happened? Nothing,” he said.
    â€œIf it’s nothing then it wasn’t worth keeping from me,” she said.
    He stopped trying to smile. He turned back to the fire and give it a final jab, then stood up and returned the poker to its stand. He faced her. “Well,” he said, “it’s something that Theron would be happier if you didn’t know about until you have to.”
    â€œHe’s not in the habit of having things he would rather I didn’t know about,” she said.
    The firelight leapt up, yet seemed actually to darken the room, withdrawing it still farther from the early dusk remaining out of doors. He did not answer at once, but stepped to the endtable beside the armchair and switched on the lamp. Still bent, his face close over the lampshade, he squinted at her and said, “This was something both of us thought you might as well be spared until you had to know.” He flushed. “Why will you put a man in the position of having to tell you he has tried to be thoughtful of you?”
    By way of reply she sat down and folded her hands, waiting to be told all.
    He leaned against the mantelpiece and said, “Well, Jim Statler came to see me this morning. He says Theron is failing in every course in school. He’s not doing the work, and he’s been playing hookey. To go hunting, of course. Jim has spoken to him about it, but it hasn’t done any good, and now he’s so far behind there’s no hope of catching up.”
    Somehow it added to her irritation to see that he was genuinely distressed over it. She half admitted that this was sheer ill-will, and knew she would have been much more irritated had he seemed not to care. But as it was, it violated an exclusive right she felt she had earned. She had fretted over Theron’s hunting, the danger, the absences from her it meant, his single-minded absorption in it. It was rather late for him , Theron’s model in it, to commence to worry. But it was not mere perversity that caused her now to take the opposite side from her husband; for the boy’s sake she was capable even of agreeing with him. She said, “He shall be taken out of school tomorrow.”
    â€œNow don’t get mad at the school because he’s failing,” he said.
    â€œTomorrow,” she repeated.
    There was no heat in it. He saw she was cold sober. She meant it. “Well, this is funny,” he said. “Anybody would have expected it to be the other way around. I thought this would bother you even more than it does me.”
    Bother her that her son was failing in public school? It was simply another proof of Theron’s superiority. She had always considered school a waste of his time—had indeed, as she later told the principal, looked with no great disapproval on his occasionally skipping for his sport. She was not exactly opposed to the cultivation of the mind, but she did think it was definitely middle-class. Education: the acquirement of useful knowledge. What use did a gentleman have for that? He could buy brains, could buy the industrious grubbers after knowledge. Oh, she had encountered people who were education-proud, and