Tomorrow Is Forever Read Online Free

suddenly thought of Dick as he had been when he was so tiny she could carry him on one arm, and he was soft and warm and smelt like talcum powder. “That’s how it goes,” she thought. “Strange, and of course it isn’t strange at all, it’s been happening like this for ten thousand years, but it still seems strange when it happens to yourself. Now before many years more he’ll marry some immature little girl like that Julia Rayford, and she’ll have a baby, and he’ll come in and bend over it with that same Good-Lord-it’s-alive expression that Spratt had the first time he saw Dick. If it’s a boy they’ll name him Richard Spratt Herlong III and if it’s a girl they’ll argue about every name from Amaryllis to Zillah and compromise on some prosaic family name like mine, and I’ll get a smug matriarchal air about me, and we’ll all have a grand time and be just as excited about it as if it hadn’t happened to anybody else. Of course, before that we’ll have to get through the war. Oh, why should any group of power-mad scoundrels have the power to send the world into a holocaust? Boys like Dick—I will not think about it now. He doesn’t think about it. Or I wonder if he does?”
    She recalled Dick at the radio the day of Pearl Harbor. She came into the living room, as stunned as everyone else was that day, to find him listening, his lips drawn back from his teeth in an expression of horror almost grotesque on so young a face. As she entered he looked up at her and said deliberately, “The yellow-bellied bastards.” She gave an exclamation, shocked to discover he had such an expression in his vocabulary, but all he did was grin mirthlessly and reply, “I know some worse words than that and if you don’t want to hear them you’d better go out and listen to the portable in the garden with the boss, because I feel like saying them.” Elizabeth was astonished, not only at his words but at his vehemence. It was the first time Dick had ever seemed to her like anything but a fun-loving little boy. The news from Pearl Harbor had shocked him into a strange and sudden maturity. She went out to the garden and told Spratt what he had said. Spratt answered tersely, “I know just how he feels.” “So do I,” said Elizabeth, “I couldn’t have scolded him with any conviction.” They listened awhile to the enraging radio voices, and suddenly she exclaimed, “Spratt! We’re in the war. That means that before long—it means Dick.” Spratt said, “Yes. I wish it meant me.” Elizabeth got chilly all over, but she told herself that day for the first time, “I don’t have to face it yet!”
    She wondered how Dick felt about it now. She was not sure. Dick spoke of the war sometimes, with the matter-of-fact assumption that when he came of age he would get into it, but right now it seemed less important to him than campus affairs, probably because by the reckoning of seventeen anything a year ahead was too remote to be of pressing concern. “Good heavens above!” she broke off her thoughts, for Dick rose up from the board, turned over twice in the air and cut like a knife into the water, reappearing just in time to hear Julia exclaim, “Dick, that’s wonderful! Do you think I could learn to do it?”
    Pudge saw Elizabeth first. He called, “How do you do, Mrs. Herlong?” and the others turned to wave at her. Elizabeth waved back as she drove the car into the garage. When she had put it up she walked across the grass toward the pool.
    â€œHello, all of you. Cherry, what on earth are you going to do with all those lemons?”
    â€œMake lemonade,” said Cherry, and Pudge added, “You don’t mind, do you?”
    â€œOf course not, but you’ve shaken down enough to make about four gallons. Pick up the rest of them in a towel or something,