“Goodness, Pete! What a question to ask!”
“Well, you might take a chance and tell me what you think. I have no doubts. My whole nature goes out to this girl; but I can’t help knowing that if we go on feeling like this till we die, we shall be the exception. Love’s a miracle. How much can one trust to it?”
The moment he had spoken he knew that he was asking a great deal. It was torture to his mother to express an opinion on an abstract question. She did not lack decision of conduct. She could resolve in an instant to send a drunkard to an institution or take a trip round the world; but on a matter of philosophy of life it was as difficult to get her to commit herself as if she had been upon the witness-stand. Yet it was just in this realm that he particularly valued her opinion.
“Oh,” she said at last, “I don’t believe that it’s possible to play safe in love. It’s a risk, but it’s one of those risks you haven’t much choice about taking. Life and death are like that, too. I don’t think it pays to be always thinking about avoiding risks. Nothing, you know,” she added, as if she were letting him in to rather a horrid little secret, “is really safe.” And evidently glad to change the subject, she went on, “What will her family say?”
“I can’t think they will be pleased.”
“I suppose not. Who are they?”
Wayne explained the family connections, but woke no associations in his mother’s mind until he mentioned the name of Farron. Then he was astonished at the violence of her interest. She sprang to her feet; her eyes lighted up.
“Why,” she cried, “that’s the man, that’s the company, that Marty Burke works for! O Pete, don’t you think you could get Mr. Farron to use his influence over Marty about Anita?”
“Dear mother, do you think you can get him to use his influence over Mrs. Farron for me?”
Marty Burke was the leader of the district and was reckoned a bad man. He and Mrs. Wayne had been waging a bitter war for some time over a young inebriate who had seduced a girl of the neighborhood. Mrs. Wayne was sternly trying to prosecute the inebriate; Burke was determined to protect him, first, by smirching the girl’s name, and, next, by getting the girl’s family to consent to a marriage, a solution that Mrs. Wayne considered most undesirable in view of the character of the prospective husband.