He wished, sometimes, that he knew Marion Hayden's
attitude. Was she like Natalie? Would she, if the time came, use
her undeniable influence for or against? And there again he
resented the influence of women in the boy's life. Why couldn't
he make his own decisions? Why couldn't they let him make his own
decisions?
He remembered his father, and how his grandmother, in '61, had put
a Bible into one pocket and a housewife into another, and had sent
him off to war. Had the fiber of our women weakened since then?
But he knew it had not. All day, in the new plant, women were
working with high-explosives quite calmly. And there were Audrey
and the Haverford women, strong enough, in all conscience.
Every mental path, those days, somehow led eventually to Audrey.
She was the lighted window at the end of the long trail.
Graham was, as a matter of fact, trying to work out his own
salvation. He blundered, as youth always blunders, and after a
violent scene with Marion Hayden he made an attempt to break off
his growing intimacy with Anna Klein - to find, as many a man had
before him, that the sheer brutality of casting off a loving woman
was beyond him.
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