“Grandma——”
“You listen! You’re a splendid young man, Dan Oliphant. You’re good-looking; you’re honourable as the daylight; you’re kindhearted, and you’d be just as polite to a nigger or a dog as you would to the President; and anybody can tell all that about you by just looking at you once. But this good-for-nothing girl and her good-for-nothing family have made you feel you weren’t anybody at all, and ought to feel flattered to scrub their doormat! Don’t tell me! They have! And because you let yourself get as soft as a ninny over a silly little pretty face, you truckle to ’em.”
“Grandma!” He laughed despairingly. “I haven’t been truckling to anybody.”
“You have, and she’ll keep you at it all your life!” the old lady said angrily. “I know what that face means. I’ve seen a thousand just like it! She’ll use you and make you truckle to be used! And if you give in to her and live in her town, she’ll despise you. If you make her come and live in your town, she’ll hate you. But she’ll always keep you truckling. Your only chance is to get rid of her.”
“Grandma,” he said desperately;—“I’m sorry, but I can’t hear you talk this way about the sweetest, the most perfect, the loveliest——”
“Get rid of her!” she cried. And as the distressed young man went out into the hall she leaned forward in her chair, shaking at him a piteously bent and emaciated forefinger. “You get rid of her, if you don’t want to die in the gutter! Get rid of her!”
CHAPTER V
DAN walked home from his grandmother’s with the wind blowing a fine snow against his chest, within which something seemed to be displaced and painful. Higher up, under the cold sleek band of his tall hat, there was a stricken puzzlement; and no doubt he was in hard case. For a young lover rebuffed upon speaking of his sweetheart is like a fine artist who has made some fragile, exquisite thing and offers it confidently in tender pride, only to see it buffeted and misprized. To Dan it seemed as though Lena herself had been injuriously mishandled, whereas the injury fell really upon something much more delicate; the lovely image he had made for himself and thought was Lena—an angelic substance most different from the substance of that “little brunette” herself.
He told himself that his grandmother had increased in unreasonableness with increasing age, but in spite of all efforts to reassure himself, and notwithstanding her prediction that he would receive a foolish support from his parents in the matter of his engagement, it was decidedly without jauntiness that he made his announcement to them after dinner that evening.
He found them in the library, a shadowy big room where the fire of soft coal twinkled again upon polished dark woodwork, upon the clear glass doors of the bookcases, and touched with rose the eye-glasses and the shining oval façade of Harlan’s shirt as he sat reading Suetonius under a tall lamp in the bay window. Harlan, unlike his father and his brother, always “dressed” for dinner.