His business had suffered from long
neglect, and suddenly for two anxious weeks he had found himself facing
bankruptcy. Edith's husband, a lawyer, had come to his aid and together
they had pulled out of the hole. But he had been forced to mortgage the
house. And this had brought to a climax all the feelings of guiltiness
which had so long been stirring within him over his failure to live up to
the promise he had made his wife.
And so Roger had looked at his children.
And at first to his profound surprise he had had it forced upon him that
these were three grown women, each equipped with her own peculiar feminine
traits and desires, the swift accumulations of lives which had expanded in
a city that had reared to the skies in the many years of his long sleep.
But very slowly, month by month, he had gained a second impression which
seemed to him deeper and more real. To the eye they were grown women all,
but inwardly they were children still, each groping for her happiness and
each held back as he had been, either by checks within herself or by the
gay distractions of the absorbing city. He saw each of his daughters, parts
of himself. And he remembered what Judith had said: "You will live on in
our children's lives." And he began to get glimmerings of a new
immortality, made up of generations, an endless succession of other lives
extending into the future.
Some of all this he remembered now, in scattered fragments here and there.
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