"Well, there's that," she said, as though he had suggested a form of consolation. "It won't be for long. It can't be. Father won't be able to go on like this."
He decided to take the bull by the horns. "Is that because my father doesn't want to renew the lease?"
She shrugged her shoulders again. "Oh no, not particularly. It is that—and everything else."
He felt it the part of tact to make signs of going, uttering a few parting injunctions with regard to the mother as he did so.
"And I wouldn't leave her too much alone," he advised. "She could easily slip out without attracting any one's attention. Tell your father I said so. I suppose he's not in the house."
"He's off somewhere trying to engage a night fireman."
He ignored this information to emphasize his counsels. "It's most important that while she's in this state of mind some one should be with her. And if we knew of anything she'd specially like—"
She continued to work industriously. "The thing she'd like best in this world won't do her any good when it happens." She threw in a bulb with impetuous vehemence. "It's to have Matt out of jail. He will be out in the course of a few months. But he'll be—a jail-bird."
"We must try to help him live that down."
She turned her great greenish eyes on him again with that look which struck him as both frank and pitiful. "That's one of the things people in our position can't do. It's the first thing mother herself will think of when she sees Matt hanging about the house—for he'll never get a job."