Jeff had refused waffles. He thrust his hands in his pockets and leaned back, regarding his father with a smile. The lines in his face, Lydia thought, fascinated, were smoothed out, all but the channels in the forehead and the cleft between his brows. That last would never go.
"I am simply," said Jeff, "so tickled I can hardly contain myself. I have discovered something."
"What?" said Lydia.
"The world," said Jeff. "Here it is. It's mine. I can have it to play with. It's yours. You can play, too. So can that black-eyed army Madame Beattie has mobilised. So can she."
Anne was looking at him in a serious anxiety.
"With conditions as they are—" said she, and Jeff interrupted her without scruple.
"That's the point. With conditions as they are, we've got to dig into things and mine out pleasures, and shake them in the faces of the mob and the mob will follow us."
The colonel had ceased eating waffles. His thin hand, not so delicate now that it had learned the touch of toil, trembled a little as it held his fork.
"Jeff," said he, "what do you want to do?"
"I want," said Jeff, "to keep this town out of the clutch of Weedie Moore."