“You see,” said Bertie, carefully looking away from him, “it isn’t as though you were both of you a few years older. You’ve neither of you seen anything of the world, and Rosamund is in some ways very undeveloped and young for her age. I don’t want either of you to take this attraction seriously—at any rate for the present.”
“Has my mother been talking to you?” demanded Morris rather sullenly.
Bertha hesitated for a moment.
“She’s only said what I felt quite sure of already—that she thinks you too young to entertain any idea of—marriage, for instance.”
She looked at him narrowly as she spoke, and Morris coloured again.
“Of course, I couldn’t think of that, exactly,” he stammered naïvely. “You know quite well that, owing to my father’s preposterous will, I haven’t anything but what she gives me.”
“Exactly, my dear boy, though you and I both know very well that she only holds the whole thing in trust for you, as it were.”
“Rotten arrangement, I call it,” muttered Morris. “Of course, I practically do all the business that old Bartlett used to do for the estate, but it’s a bore being tied here and never my own master. I should have been in Germany studying music for the last four years if mother hadn’t made such a frightful fuss at the idea.”
“I wish you and she understood one another better,” sighed Bertha. “My sympathies are always on the young people’s side, you know, Morris, though your mother is my greatest friend.”
“Really?” he said eagerly. “Then I wish you’d talk to her a bit.”