“Yes,” he said, “I was keeping to the argument about Dan.”
Martha laughed at his calm sophistry, but was content to seem to accept it and to waive her point. “What do your father and mother think of ‘Ornaby Addition’?”
“Oh, you know them! They understand as well as anybody that it’s all folly, but they don’t say so to Dan. I think poor father would even put something in just to please Dan, if he could spare it after what he’s lost in bad loans this year.”
“How about Mrs. Savage?”
“Grandmother!” Harlan was amused at this suggestion. “Dan has to keep away from her; she’s taken such a magnificently healthy prejudice against his little Miss McMillan she won’t talk to him about anything else, and Dan can’t stand it. Not much chance for ‘Ornaby’ there, Martha!”
“No; she is a plaster of Paris old thing!”
“Inordinately. She’s always been set about me, Martha,” Harlan remarked with a ruefulness in which there was a measure of philosophic amusement. “She’s always maintained that I’d never amount to anything—I have the terrible faults of being an egotist and smoking cigarettes—but she’s sometimes admitted she thought Dan might. That’s why she’s furious with him about throwing himself away on this ‘spoiled ninny of a photograph girl’—her usual way of referring to Miss McMillan. Grandmother’s twice as furious with him as if she hadn’t always been like you, Martha.”
“Like me? How?”
“I mean about your feeling toward Dan and me.” Harlan smiled, but his eyes were expressive of something far from amusement. It was as if here he referred to an old and troubling puzzlement of his, but had long ago resigned himself to the impossibility of finding a solution. “I mean she’s like you because she’s always thought so much more of Dan than she has of me, Martha.”
“Perhaps it’s because you’ve never seemed to think much of anything, yourself,” she said gently. “Perhaps we’re apt to like people best who do a great deal of liking themselves.”