“But I haven’t told you——”
Again she disregarded him. “I know these New York highty-tighties!” she said. “Your grandfather and I went to Saratoga the year after the war, and we spent a month there. We saw a plenty of ’em! They aren’t fit to do anything but flirt and talk French and go to soirées. They’re the most ignorant people I ever met in my life. They’re so ignorant if you asked their opinion of Lalla Rookh they wouldn’t know what you were talking about; but they think you’re funny if you don’t know that some fancy milliner of theirs keeps store on Broadway and not on the Bowery. That’s about the measure of ’em.”
“Well, not nowadays, exactly,” her grandson said indulgently. “Some of the ones you saw at Saratoga thirty or forty years ago may have been like that, grandma, but nowadays——”
“Nowadays,” she said, taking the word up sharply, “they’re just the same. They fooled the young men then just the same as they fool ’em now. They make a young man like you think they know everything, because they’re pretty and talk that affected way Harlan does.”
“But with them it isn’t affected, grandma. It’s natural with them. They’ve always——”
But the obdurate old lady contradicted him instantly. “It’s not! It isn’t natural for any human being to talk like that! You mustn’t bring one of those girls out here to live, Dan.”
“Grandma”—he began in an uneasy voice; “Grandma, I came here to tell you——”
“Yes, I was afraid of it,” she said. “I was afraid of it.”
“Afraid of what?”
A plaintive frown appeared upon her forehead before she answered. She sighed deeply, as if the increased rapidity of her breathing had made her insecure of continuing to breathe at all; and her frail hands, folded in her lap, moved nervously. “Don’t do it, Dan,” she said. “You ought to wait a few years before you marry, anyway. You’re so young, and one of those New York girls wouldn’t understand things here; she wouldn’t know enough not to feel superior. You’d just make misery for yourself.”