"Oh, no," said Mrs. Choate. "Mary wouldn't want to. She's bewitched with those French girls. And I don't want to. I couldn't go the only way I'd like."
"You could go any way you chose," said Alston, touched. He knew there was a war chest, and it irked him to think his mother wouldn't have it tapped for her.
"Oh, no," said she. "I should need to be slim and light, and put on short petticoats and ride horses and get away from tigers. I don't want to shoot them, but I'd rather like to get away from them."
"Mother," said Alston, "what's come over you? Is it this book?"
She laughed, in an easy good-humour.
"Books don't come over me," said she. "I believe it's that old Madame Beattie."
"What's Madame Beattie done that any—" he paused; Esther's wrongs at Madame Beattie's hands were too red before him—"that any lady would be willing to do?"
"I really don't know, Alston," said his mother frankly. "It's only that when I think of that old party going out every night—"
"Not every night."
"Well, when she likes, and getting up on a platform and telling goodness knows what to the descendants of the oldest civilisations, and their bringing her home on their shoulders—"