“Poor mama!” Alice laughed compassionately. “Poor mama!”
“He is, though,” Mrs. Adams maintained. “He's very much of a gentleman, unless I'm no judge of appearances; and it'll really be nice to have him in the house.”
“No doubt,” Alice said, as she opened her door to depart. “I don't suppose we'll mind having any of 'em as much as we thought we would. Good-bye.”
But her mother detained her, catching her by the arm. “Alice, you do hate it, don't you!”
“No,” the girl said, quickly. “There wasn't anything else to do.”
Mrs. Adams became emotional at once: her face cried tragedy, and her voice misfortune. “There MIGHT have been something else to do! Oh, Alice, you gave your father bad advice when you upheld him in taking a miserable little ninety-three hundred and fifty from that old wretch! If your father'd just had the gumption to hold out, they'd have had to pay him anything he asked. If he'd just had the gumption and a little manly COURAGE——”
“Hush!” Alice whispered, for her mother's voice grew louder. “Hush! He'll hear you, mama.”
“Could he hear me too often?” the embittered lady asked. “If he'd listened to me at the right time, would we have to be taking in boarders and sinking DOWN in the scale at the end of our lives, instead of going UP? You were both wrong; we didn't need to be so panicky—that was just what that old man wanted: to scare us and buy us out for nothing! If your father'd just listened to me then, or if for once in his life he'd just been half a MAN——”
Alice put her hand over her mother's mouth. “You mustn't! He WILL hear you!”
But from the other side of Adams's closed door his voice came querulously. “Oh, I HEAR her, all right!”