"No, she wasn't old—school girls and fellows laughing in the ball room, or breathing fast after a hard ride. You didn't know Sydney in those days. And men grown old behind their beards for want of understanding; because they're too dense to understand what living means. Men are dense. Are ye listening?"
The question came with such queer aged force that Jack started almost out of his chair.
"Yes, marm," he said.
"'Yes marm!' he says!" she repeated, with a queer little grin of amusement. "Listen to this grandfather's chit saying 'Yes marm!' to me! Well, they'll have their way. My friends are nearly all gone, so I suppose I shall soon be going. Not but what there's plenty of amusement here."
She looked round in an odd way, as if she saw ghosts. Jack would have given his skin to escape her.
"Listen," she said with sudden secrecy. "I want ye to do something for me. You love Lennie, don't ye?"
Jack nodded.
"So do I! I'm going to help him." Her voice became sharp with secrecy. "I've put by a stocking for him," she hissed. "At least it's not a stocking, it's a tin box, but it's the same thing. It's up there!" She pointed with her stick at the wide black chimney. "D'ye understand?"
She eyed Jack with aged keenness, and he nodded, though his understanding was rather vague. Truth to tell, nothing she said seemed to him quite real. As if, poor Gran, her age put her outside of reason.
"That stocking is for Lennie. Tom's mother was nobody knows who, though I'm not going to say Jacob never married her, if Jack says he did. But Tom'll get everything. The same as Jacob did. That's how it hits back at me. I wanted Jacob to have the place, and now it goes to Tom, and my little Lennie gets nothing. Alice has been a good woman, and a good wife to Jacob: better than he deserved. I'm going to stand by her. That stocking in there is for Lennie because he's her eldest son. In a tin box. Y'understand?"