This Side of Glory by Gwen Bristow Page A

man’s body, and you deserve better than that.”
    As he paused, Eleanor stood up. Her hands were in the pockets of her skirt. Fred saw them swell the cloth as they doubled into fists. It was his own movement of determination.
    “All right, dad,” she said evenly. “I’ve listened. Now I’ll tell you. I love Kester. That’s all.”
    Fred thought he should have known that if Eleanor ever loved a man it would be like this. She was so intense. Feeling that he would have given anything he owned to pierce the armor of infatuation around her, he tried again.
    “I know you think that’s enough, Eleanor. But believe me, it’s not.”
    Eleanor looked past him as though he were not there. “Maybe you’ve forgotten,” she said slowly. “Maybe it never happened to you like this. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about love. But nobody seems to mean what I mean.”
    “No, Eleanor,” he said wearily. “Everybody means what you mean.”
    But it was no use. Fred told her everything he believed was true, that Kester had never accepted the responsibility for his own life and was unfit to accept the responsibility for hers. As he persisted Eleanor grew furious. She flashed at him as she had never done, then she became penitent and pled for his comprehension, and at last she cried out despairingly, “It’s no use, dad. I love him. Why can’t you understand me? You always have before!”
    She crumpled up by the desk and began to sob. It was the first time he had seen her shed tears since she was a little girl. He understood, with a pain that went very deep, that she was crying because all her life he had been her best friend. Eleanor was his first child and nearer to him than any of the others. She had run to him for comfort about her broken dolls and had accepted his rebukes for her childish sins, she had gone to him for counsel and he had talked over his own problems with her, and there had never been any anger between them. Fred stroked her shoulder clumsily. He was sure she was facing fierce disillusion, and the more he tried to tell her so the more he would succeed in making her hate him. But because he loved her he had not the faintest intention of being lenient. He wished they were back in the days when a man could lock up his daughter till she was willing to obey him.
    5
    Eleanor said nothing to Kester about her father’s opposition. She went through her work as usual and continued to see Kester every afternoon. They generally went out in his car, for his parents still lingered at Ardeith and he seemed to think they would be in the way when he and Eleanor had so much to say to each other. Eleanor supposed he had told them about their engagement, but she did not ask. It was enough to get away from her father’s hurt indignation into the wonder and peace that came to her when she and Kester were together.
    But in less than two weeks the levee was finished and she was back in New Orleans, and now that she could not see Kester every day she found her battle with her father becoming a strain that increased as she grew tired of it.
    Her mother was more tolerant. Mrs. Upjohn was a woman who took life as it came. Born Molly Thompson, she had lost her parents during her babyhood, grown up in a Methodist orphan asylum and gone from there to stand behind a counter in a department store, where she had met Fred Upjohn, who was then a sub-foreman on a levee job. When they were married she went up to camp and cooked for Fred and five other men, not accepting the help of a Negro woman until a month before Eleanor was born and then only because Fred insisted on it, Molly’s opinion being that it was a shame to pay out wages when Fred needed the money to buy his engineering books. Molly had had six children in eleven years, and with prosperity she had grown fat, comfortable and more than ever easy to live with. Having observed that the world did not always adjust itself to meet her convenience, she assumed that the Lord knew more than