VI
In their rooms at The Worthy that night, after Madelaine and Nathan had left town, Mrs. Anna Forge and Edith locked their door carefully. Mrs. Forge had read in newspapers of “strange men” who “prowled” around hotel corridors.
“Whew!” cried Edith, flopping down in a rocker and sprawling her ungainly legs. “After all that class, I’m plumb bowled over. My Gawd, Ma, think of it! And Natie’s gotta spend all the rest of life livin’ up to it. Poor Natie!”
Mrs. Forge stood by the window, holding to the lace drape and using a badly overworked handkerchief as it was needed at her features. Whatever else might be said for Mrs. Anna Forge in her sunset years, she had not forgotten how to weep.
“I think it was all heavenly, Edie. For one afternoon—for the first time in all my life—I just reveled in it. And I think Natie’s the luckiest boy in the world.”
“Baggin’ a million dollars? You bet! But think of havin’ to sit around all the rest of life on your manners and never darin’ to open your mouth for fear o’ puttin’ your foot in it! Gawd, it’d have me in a sanatorium in a month!”
“Nathan’s got what he wanted and deserved. He can’t help but be happy with that beautiful wife and surrounded by fine things.”
“Sufferin’ catfish, Ma! You don’t mean to say you’d wanner live up to it, too? Then it ain’t hard to see where Natie gets his crazy ideas for swell things and manners. You can knock Pa all you wanner. But he’s my dad and I’m his girl. And I kiss my soup at table if I feel like it, and if I wanner I loll ’round the house in a blanket. That’s my privilege. No airs to me. You always know just where to find me. I’m honest!”
And Edith fully believed that she was and remained smugly content, the “mother of seven.”
Mrs. Forge not answering (Mrs. Forge, in fact, living over the glories of that wonder-day with the lacklustre gone from her pin-point eyes and her pinched face softened, for the first time in years), Edith finally concluded:
“Say, Ma! Wonder how quick it’d be safe to ‘touch’ Nat for a couple o’ thousand—and stand any show o’ gettin’ it? Joe’s gettin’ awful restless lately with so many kids to support. And a couple thousand would give him a swell start in the express business. Nat oughta set him up. It’s his duty. After all, he can’t sneak outta the fact that I’m his sister!”