I held out my hand, which he shook solemnly, but with an injured air.
“Do you mean to tell me,” asked Miss Frayne, “that your father and mother went away without seeing the baby?”
Ptolemy flushed a little.
“You see,” he explained apologetically, “mother gets woolly when she writes and she’s forgotten there’s Di. She thinks Demetrius is the youngest. She’s mad 225 about writing. If she sees a blank paper anywhere, she ain’t happy until she has written something on it, and the sight of a pencil makes her fingers itch.”
“Take warning, Miss Frayne,” I said, “and don’t get too literary.”
“Some day,” resumed Ptolemy, “mother’ll get the antiques all out of her system and then she’ll remember us.”
I liked the boy’s defense of his mother, and I began to see that Rob was right in thinking there were possibilities in the lad, but it was Silvia’s influence that had developed them, for in the days when he borrowed soup plates of us, there had been no redeeming trait that I could discern.