“What is this mysterious thing you are hiding? A new collie, or a plant that sings between drinks, or some new genius? Tell, oh, sloe-eyed daughter of my race!”
“You can laugh at me, if you like; but I tell you, John, I’ve struck it rich. You’ll have to wait. All things come to him who waits. First my woods and roads and drains, and then—your reward.”
They had arrived at the Terminal by this time and John had all he could do to guide Ruth through the crowd into the train. In due course they reached home and a short time after the modest family of three were seated round the dinner-table.
Though a simple function, dinner was always an important affair for Mrs. Morton when her son was with them. She took pride in seating him in the high-backed chair at the head of the table and would gaze lovingly at his handsome face and listen entranced to his conversation. In Mrs. Morton’s opinion John could talk better than Daniel Webster. A day’s absence would afford her an excuse for discovering new virtues in her boy. Unlike the other women of her station, she had remained what they would have characterized as “old-fashioned.” Home to her had its old meanings and old duties—it meant home, and not a mere stopping-place for the country club or the golf links or the porch for slangy gossip. So that visitors to her house still found in it the air of bygone days and were grateful for it.
Mrs. Morton had long since laid out her course of life and kept to it. She knew that so long as John felt that he was taking care of her and Ruth, he would stick to his business. She herself was not at all necessary to him; but her pride lay in his strength and ability to succeed. She was deeply afraid he might drift again into the “bohemian life” of aimless study and travel, as she classed his previous lapses into those fields. She could understand being a gentleman of leisure, even approve of it; she could easily accept the life of ceaseless labor and planning of business enterprises, for she had had the example of that in her boy’s father; but she could see nothing in studying for study’s sake, or in a devotion to research for the object of discovery. This might do for eccentric foreigners or crazy college professors; but for a Morton or a Randolph?—Never!
But Ruth had no such compunctions of mind, no such scruples of conscience or carefully set plans. As they sat over the meal and she listened to the serious discussion between her mother and John on subjects in which she had not the slightest interest, she became impatient.
“Mother, dear,” she said, breaking in. “I must tell you what happened to me this afternoon. Please stop talking shop and bothering about those horrid men in their offices, without souls, who sit there like spiders in webs. Anyone listening to you two would think you were a couple of promoters.”
“I think, Ruth, you might have chosen a better comparison,” remarked Mrs. Morton severely. “What is this wonderful thing that happened?”
Ruth, not a bit abashed at the reproof, went on:
“Well, Hattie and I were snoopin’ around looking for things, you know——”