"It's good in you, Elizabeth," he said, and he lingered an instant in pronouncing the syllables of her name, "but you really overestimate. Dick's all right, but he's young. I'm not old, to be sure; but he'd think me old."
"I can see that would be in the way," she frankly admitted. "I don't know just how it could be done; perhaps it can't be done at all."
"And then, besides all that," Marriott went on, "I don't know of any good I could do him. I don't know that there is anything he really needs more than we all need."
"Oh, yes there is," she insisted. "And there is much you could give him. Perhaps it would bore you--"
He protested.
"Oh, I know!" she said determinedly. "We can be frank with each other, Gordon. Dick is a man only in size and the clothes he wears; he's still a child--a good, kind-hearted, affectionate, thoughtless child. The whole thing perplexes me and it has perplexed papa--you might as well know that. I have tried, and I can do nothing. He doesn't care for books, and somehow when I prescribe books and they fail, or are not accepted, I'm at the end of my resources. I have been trying to think it all out, but I can't. I know that something is wrong, but I can't tell you what it is. I only know that I feel it, and that it troubles me and worries me--and that I am tired." Then, as if he might misunderstand, she went on with an air of haste: "I don't mean necessarily anything wrong in Dick himself, but something wrong in--oh, I don't know what I mean!"
She lifted her hand in a little gesture of despair.
"I feel somehow that the poor boy has had no chance in the world--though he has had every advantage and opportunity." Her face lighted up instantly with a kind of pleasure. "That's it!" she exclaimed. "You see"--it was all clear to her just then, or would be if she could put the thought into words before she lost it--"there is nothing for him to do; there is no work for him, no necessity for his working at all. This new place he has in the Trust Company--he seems happy and important in it just now, but after all it doesn't seem to me real; he isn't actually needed there; he got the place just because Mr. Hunter is a friend of papa." The thought that for an instant had seemed on the point of being posited was nebulous again. "Don't you understand?" she said, turning to him for help.
"I think I do," said Marriott. His brows were contracted and he was trying to grasp her meaning.
"It's hard to express," Elizabeth went on. "I think I mean that Dick would be a great deal better off if he did not have a--rich father." She hesitated before saying it, a little embarrassed. "If he had to work, if he had his own way to make in the world--"