"Your father and mother for one."
She admitted the importance of this. "But you won't find that hurdle hard to take if you're Harry Whitelaw."
"But if I'm not?"
"I'm sure from what mother writes that you can be."
"And I'm sure from what I feel that I can't."
"Oh, but you haven't tried." She hurried on from this to give him the gist of her mother's letters on the subject. "She and Mr. Whitelaw have the most tremendous confabs about you, every time he comes to Boston. The fact that he can't talk to Mrs. Whitelaw—she's all nerves the minute you're mentioned—throws him back on mother. That flatters the dear old lady like anything. She begins to think now she adopted you in infancy. You were her discovery. She gave you your first leg-up. And after all, you know, we've got to admit that during the whole of these seven years she might have been a great deal worse."
He agreed with her gratefully.
"As a matter of fact," she went on, in her judicial tone, "you must hand it to us Boston people that, while we can be the most awful snobs, we're not such snobs that we don't know a good thing when we see it. It's only the second-cut among us, those who don't really belong, who are supercilious. Once you concede that we're as superior as we think ourselves, we can be pretty generous. If you've got it in you to climb up we not only won't kick you down, but we'll put out our hands and pull you. That's Boston; that's dad and mother. When you've made all the fun of them you like, the poor dears still have that much left which you can't take away from them."
Something of this Tom was to test by the time he and Hildred met again. It was not another two years before they did that, but it was a year. Demobilized in Washington, he traveled straight to Boston. He had made his plans. Before seeing Hildred again he would see her father. "It's the only straight thing to do," he told himself. After all the years in which they had been good to him he couldn't begin again to go in and out of their house while they were ignorant of what he hoped for. Hildred might have told them something; he didn't know; but the details of most importance were those which only he himself could give them.
Having written for a very private appointment, Ansley had told him to come to his office immediately on his arrival in Boston. He reached that city by half-past three; he was at the office by a little after four.