When her husband made this sort of reference, Mrs. Fabian was glad that she was not Edgar's own mother; yet since she had known Phil she had never entirely escaped a consciousness that Mary Sidney would have bent the twig in Edgar's childhood in a manner to have produced a different inclination in the tree.
As Christmas approached, Mrs. Fabian detained her son one evening as he was about to leave the house.
"Edgar, you are always in such a hurry," she complained. "I never can catch you for a word except at table when the servants are about. Sit down for five minutes."
The youth paused reluctantly. "I must keep my engagements," he said, shrugging his shoulders, "and since the Administration has shut down on my using the car at night, I have to live by my wits; in other words, sponge on other people's motors as much as possible."
"You know, dear," said Mrs. Fabian, "your father didn't do that until we found, evening after evening, that we could never have the car ourselves. Somehow or other, Edgar, you manage very badly. You always rub your father the wrong way."
Edgar's chest in his dress shirt rose very high. "I'm not the cringing, begging sort," he returned. "Unless a thing is offered me freely I don't care for it."
In the last month he had affected a short, pointed mustache, and this he now twisted with a haughty air.
Mrs. Fabian's sense of humor was latent, but she smiled now. "Sit down a minute, dear," she said. "It won't detain you, for you may use the car to-night. Your father has just 'phoned that he is obliged to attend a sudden meeting of directors, so I have to give up the opera—unless you will go with me?"
Edgar regarded his mother's charming toilet appraisingly. "I don't mind," he said graciously, "if you will ask Mrs. Larrabee. I was going there to call to-night."