Naturally, Mr. Baxter perceived whither she was drifting. “Forty dollars isn't a thousand,” he interrupted, “but what you want to throw it away for? One reason a boy of seventeen oughtn't to have evening clothes is the way he behaves with ANY clothes. Forty dollars! Why, only this summer he sat down on Jane's open paint-box, twice in one week!”
“Well—Miss Pratt IS going away, and the dance will be her last night. I'm afraid it would really hurt him to miss it. I remember once, before we were engaged—that evening before papa took me abroad, and you—”
“It's no use, mamma,” he said. “We were both in the twenties—why, I was six years older than Willie, even then. There's no comparison at all. I'll let him order a dress-suit on his twenty-first birthday and not a minute before. I don't believe in it, and I intend to see that he gets all this stuff out of his system. He's got to learn some hard sense!”
Mrs. Baxter shook her head doubtfully, but she said no more. Perhaps she regretted a little that she had caused Mr. Baxter's evening clothes to be so expansively enlarged—for she looked rather regretful. She also looked rather incomprehensible, not to say cryptic, during the long silence which followed, and Mr. Baxter resumed his rocking, unaware of the fixity of gaze which his wife maintained upon him—a thing the most loyal will do sometimes.
The incomprehensible look disappeared before long; but the regretful one was renewed in the mother's eyes whenever she caught glimpses of her son, that day, and at the table, where William's manner was gentle—even toward his heartless father.
Underneath that gentleness, the harried self of William was no longer debating a desperate resolve, but had fixed upon it, and on the following afternoon Jane chanced to be a witness of some resultant actions. She came to her mother with an account of them.
“Mamma, what you s'pose Willie wants of those two ole market-baskets that were down cellar?”
“Why, Jane?”
“Well, he carried 'em in his room, an' then he saw me lookin'; an' he said, 'G'way from here!' an' shut the door. He looks so funny! What's he want of those ole baskets, mamma?”
“I don't know. Perhaps he doesn't even know, himself, Jane.”