Broken Barriers

As the train sped through the night Grace Durland decided that after all it didn’t matter so much!

She had parted tearfully from the girls at the sorority house and equally poignant had been the goodbyes to her friends among the faculty; but now that it was all over she was surprised and a little mystified that she had so quickly recovered from her disappointment. Bitterness had welled in her heart at the first reading of her mother’s letter calling her home. Her brother Roy, always the favored one, was to remain at the University to finish the law course, for which he had shown neither aptitude nor zeal, and this hurt a little. And they might have warned her of the impending crisis in the family fortunes before she left home to begin the fall term, only a month earlier.

But her resentment had passed. The spirit of adventure beat in her breast with strong insistent wing. With the fatalism of imaginative youth she was already assuring herself that some force beyond her control had caught her up and was bearing her on irresistibly.

She lay back at ease in her seat in the day coach, grateful that there were no acquaintances on the train to interrupt her reveries. She was twenty-one, tall, slightly above medium height and bore every mark of sound health and wholesome living--a fair representative of the self-reliant American girls visible on the campus of all Mid-Western colleges. The excitement of her hasty packing and leave-taking had left a glow in her olive cheeks. Her hair, where it showed under her sport hat, was lustrous black; her eyes were brown, though in shadow they changed to jade,--variable, interesting eyes they were, that arrested attention by their quick play of emotion. They expressed her alert intelligence, her frank curiosity, her sympathetic and responsive nature.

When the train reached Indianapolis she left her trunk check with the transfer agent and boarded a street-car. At Washington street, she transferred to the trolley line that ran down New York street, where the Durland home faced Military Park. New York street between the old canal and the western end of the park had once been a fashionable quarter of the town, and the old houses still stood though their glory of the Civil War time and the years immediately succeeding had departed. The Durlands lived in a big square brick house, set well back in a yard that rose a little above the street. The native forest trees in the lots all along the block added to the impression of age imparted by the houses themselves. Under the branches of the big walnut in the Durland front yard the neighborhood children of Grace’s generation had gathered to play. The tree was identified with her earliest recollections; it had symbolized the stability of the home itself.

She pushed open the iron gate and hurried up the brick walk. Her ring brought her mother to the door, clutching a newspaper.

“Why, Grace! I had no _idea_----”

She caught the girl in her arms, then held her away, looked into her eyes and kissed her.

“I’m so sorry, dear! I know what it means to you. It’s a terrible disappointment to all of us.”

“Oh, I understand everything, mother.”

“But I didn’t expect you so soon. I don’t see how you managed it. I thought you’d probably wait till Saturday.”

“Oh, I couldn’t have done that, mother.”

“How’s Roy? He didn’t write at all last week.”

“He’s flourishing and sent his love to everybody. He promises to work harder than ever now.”

“I’m sure he will. I know he was sorry to see you leave; he’d know what a wrench it would be for you.”

They had been talking in the hall, with Grace’s suitcase and tennis racket lying on the floor where she had dropped them. She pushed them out of the way at the foot of the old-fashioned stair that rose steeply just inside the door.

“Don’t bother about your things now, Grace. Your father’s in the sitting room and Ethel’s up in the spare room sewing. Have you had your supper? There’s some cold baked chicken in the ice-box and I can make you some hot tea.”

“Oh, I had supper before I left, mother.”

Mrs. Durland lifted her head and called her older daughter’s name and from some remote place Ethel answered. Mrs. Durland was as dark as Grace, but cast in a larger mold, and while there were points of resemblance in their faces there was a masculine vigor in the mother that the girl lacked. Mrs. Durland’s iron-gray hair was brushed back smoothly from her low broad forehead. She wore an authoritative air, suggesting at once managerial capacity; a woman, one would say, strongly independent in her thinking; self-assertive and obstinate, but of kind and generous impulses.

Grace was already in the sitting room, where she tip-toed up behind her father, who was absorbed in a book that he read as it lay on the table before him. His bent shoulders suggested that this was his habitual manner of managing a book. Grace passed her hands over his thick shock of disordered hair and patted his cheek; then bent and laid her face against his.

“Well, here I am, daddy!”

“Not home, Grace!” he exclaimed looking up at her bewilderedly. “They didn’t tell me you were coming.”

“I’m a surprise! Nobody knew I was coming tonight!”

“Well, well; I didn’t know there was a train at this hour. It’s nice to see you, Grace.”

He turned to the open volume with an absent confused air, as though uncertain whether anything further was expected of him, then pushed his chair back from the table. Mrs. Durland had come in, followed quickly by Ethel carrying a work-basket and a blouse that she had been at work on when interrupted by the announcement of her sister’s arrival.

Ethel was twenty-seven, an indefinite blonde, and not so tall as Grace. Her mother said that she was a Durland, specifically like one of her husband’s sisters in Ohio, a person for whom Mrs. Durland had never evinced any great liking. Mrs. Durland was a Morley and the Morleys were a different stock, with the Kentucky background so precious in the eyes of many Indianians. Mrs. Durland’s father had been a lawyer of small attainments in a southern Indiana county, but it was in her grandfather Josiah B. Morley, who sat in the Constitutional Convention of 1851, and was later a speaker of the Indiana house of representatives, that her pride concentrated. She had married Durland in Rangerton, where as a young man he had begun with Isaac Cummings the manufacture of a few mechanical specialties, removing shortly to Indianapolis with a number of Durland’s inventions and Cummings’s small capital as the foundation of their fortune.

“Things have changed some since you left, Grace. And I’m sorry you had to quit school,” Durland was saying, while Ethel, having greeted her sister, sat down by the smoldering coal fire and resumed her sewing.

“It’s all right, father,” said Grace, who had taken off her hat and coat. “I came back as soon as I got the news so you and mother would know it’s all right with me. We’re all going to put up a cheerful front, no matter what happens.”

“Of course we’ve all got to do that,” murmured Ethel without looking up.

“It’s hard on you children,” said Durland. “It’s all my fault; I’ve got nobody to blame but myself, Grace. Cummings always seemed willing for me to go on as I did for twenty years, trying to improve on the old patents and develop new ideas. But ideas don’t come as fast as they used to. I guess he thought he’d got everything I was ever likely to have to offer.”

“It was certainly unkind, after all the years you’d been together. But I don’t believe for a minute your work’s done. You’ll strike something bigger than any of your old inventions.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling father,” said Ethel. “A man who’s spent years inventing things is likely to find something big any time. Of course, without the shop father can’t work as well, but he’s going to have a shop of his own.”

“Oh, that’s fine, father!” exclaimed Grace. “Where is the new place going to be?”

“It’s not much of a place,” Durland answered apologetically. “I rented a little room in the Billings Power Building and am going to run a pattern and model shop. I hope to get enough work right away to pay the rent.”

“I’m sure you will. Everybody who knows anything about the machinery business knows you’re the inventor of the only good things Cummings-Durland make.”

“They’ve changed the name of the company now,” Ethel remarked. “They’ve cut father’s name out.”

“They changed the name in reorganizing the company,” Durland explained patiently in his colorless tone. “I had some loans the bank wouldn’t carry any longer; stock I put up as collateral had to be sold and Cummings bought it.”

“A man who will do a thing like that will be punished for it; he won’t prosper,” said Ethel in a curious, strained voice.

Durland frowned at his older daughter. Evidently her remark was distasteful to him; he found no consolation in the prediction that unseen powers would punish Cummings for his perfidy.

“I’d probably have done the same thing if I’d been in his place. Everything he turned down--my new ideas, I mean--proved to be no good when I put my own money into ’em on the side. You’ve got to be fair about it.”