“He's dead.”
“Then his family——”
“I don't think he left any family,” Mrs. Adams said. “Anyhow, it belongs to your father. At least it belongs to him as much as it does to any one else. He's got an absolutely perfect right to do anything he wants to with it, and it would make us all comfortable if he'd do what I want him to—and he KNOWS it would, too!”
Alice shook her head pityingly. “Poor mama!” she said. “Of course he knows it wouldn't do anything of the kind, or else he'd have done it long ago.”
“He would, you say?” her mother cried. “That only shows how little you know him!”
“Poor mama!” Alice said again, soothingly. “If papa were like what you say he is, he'd be—why, he'd be crazy!”
Mrs. Adams agreed with a vehemence near passion. “You're right about him for once: that's just what he is! He sits up there in his stubbornness and lets us slave here in the kitchen when if he wanted to—if he'd so much as lift his little finger——”
“Oh, come, now!” Alice laughed. “You can't build even a glue factory with just one little finger.”
Mrs. Adams seemed about to reply that finding fault with a figure of speech was beside the point; but a ringing of the front door bell forestalled the retort. “Now, who do you suppose that is?” she wondered aloud, then her face brightened. “Ah—did Mr. Russell ask if he could——”
“No, he wouldn't be coming this evening,” Alice said. “Probably it's the great J. A. Lamb: he usually stops for a minute on Thursdays to ask how papa's getting along. I'll go.”