“You know I don’t care,” she said. “I am a catty old thing. I’d just love it if we had a little place all our very own—just a teeny, weeny bungalow. I’d help you with your work, and keep hens, and have a little garden with onions and radishes and everything, and we wouldn’t have to buy anything from the grocery store, and a bank account, and one sow; and when we drove into the city people would say, ‘There goes Guy Thackeray Evans, the famous author, but I wonder where his wife got that hat!’”
“Oh, Ev!” he cried laughing. “You never can be serious more than two seconds, can you?”
“Why should I be?” she inquired. “And anyway, I was. It really would be elegantiferous if we had a little place of our own; but my husband has got to be able to support me, Guy. He’d lose his self-respect if he didn’t; and then, if he lost his, how could I respect him? You’ve got to have respect on both sides, or you can’t have love and happiness.”
His face grew stern with determination.
“I’ll get the money,” he said; but he did not look at her. “But now that Grace is going away, mother will be all alone if I leave, too. Couldn’t we live with her for a while?”
“Papa and mama have always said that it was the worst thing a young married couple could do,” she replied. “We could live near her, and see her every day; but I don’t think we should all live together. Really, though, do you think Grace is going? It seems just too awful.”
“I am afraid she is,” he replied sadly. “Mother is all broken up about it; but she tries not to let Grace know.”
“I can’t understand it,” said the girl. “It seems to me a selfish thing to do, and yet Grace has always been so sweet and generous. No matter how much I wanted to go, I don’t believe I could bring myself to do it, knowing how terribly it would hurt papa. Just think, Guy—it is the first break, except for the short time we were away at school, since we have been born. We have all lived here always, it seems, your family and mine, like one big family; but after Grace goes it will be the beginning of the end. It will never be the same again.”
There was a note of seriousness and sadness in her voice that sounded not at all like Eva Pennington. The boy shook his head.
“It is too bad,” he said; “but Grace is so sure she is right—so positive that she has a great future before her, and that we shall all be so proud of her—that sometimes I am convinced myself.”