"Oh, well, Rosamund, the family can stand it! You must admit that! I am sure the Stanfields and the Berkleys and the Randalls need not mind a—a—an alliance with—with the millions of a Benson Flood!"
Rosamund sighed impatiently. "Oh, dear, Cecilia," she said, "I do wish it were in my power to give you half my money!"
Mrs. Maxwell smiled with pursed lips. "So do I," she declared. "I'd take it in a minute! But you can't! You can't do one single thing with it until you're twenty-five, except spend the income; and you've got six months more before your birthday. And even then you won't want to give me half of it, because now you don't even want me to spend the income! Gracious! I wish I had a chance at it!"
"I do give you half of my income, Cecilia!"
"No, you don't," Mrs. Maxwell contradicted, in a voice that echoed an old complaint. "You only give me half of the sum you think two people ought to spend! As if it isn't right and one's duty to spend all one can! I know there's something about keeping money in circulation, and all that, if only I could remember it! But nothing would move you! Poor dear Mamma used to say that Colonel Randall was obstinate—most obstinate, Rosamund; and I must say that you don't take after the Stanfields at all, not at all!"
Mrs. Maxwell's grievances, thus expressed, began to be too much for her; she spoke through tears. "I am sure I have tried to do my very best by you, Rosamund, since Mamma died! The accounts the Trust Company made me keep all those years were dreadful, perfectly dreadful! But I used to struggle through them somehow, because I was sustained by the thought that when you were twenty-five we could just spend and spend and spend and never have to bother about keeping accounts or being economical or anything! But it will be just the same then! I know it will! Why, you haven't even one automobile!"
Her sister's tears and the fatuity of her arguments were as unfailing an appeal to Rosamund as they would have been to a man; she got up and put her arms around Cecilia.
"You silly old darling!" she laughed. "You shall have an automobile! You may have two if you want them, and I will give you every penny of my income that we haven't spent in the last three years! But for goodness sake, don't cry!"
Mrs. Maxwell followed up her victory. "Will you go to Oakleigh?" she asked.
Rosamund capitulated. "Oh, I suppose so!" she said, and shrugged. Then she added, with a somewhat malicious little smile, "It goes without saying that Marshall goes, too?"