"Disrespect! To you! Well, upon my word!"
"Yes, I know it strikes you as extraordinary. If it had been written 'Honor thy sons and thy daughters' along with 'Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother' there'd have been a lot less trouble in the world. You never did respect your own people—your own family. You've never shown respect to Lottie or to mother, or to father or to Aunt Charlotte, for that matter. So why should I expect you to respect me. I'm marrying Jesse Dick because he's the man I want to marry. I may be making a mistake but if I am I'm willing to pay for it. At least I'll have only myself to reproach."
"You children to-day think you know everything, but you don't. You wait. You'll see. I know."
"No you don't. You didn't know when you married. You thought you were making a good match and your husband turned out to be a good-for-nothing rogue. I'm sorry to hurt you but you make me do it. If I'm wrong I'll have the satisfaction of knowing I went into it with my eyes open. I know all Jesse Dick's weaknesses and I love them. Five years from now he'll be a famous American poet—if not the most famous. I know just what he needs. He needs me, for one thing. In time he may go off with other women——"
"Charley Kemp how can you sit there and talk like that!"
"—but he'll come back to me. I know. I'll keep on with my job at Shields'. In two or three years I'll be making a very respectable number of thousands a year."
"And in the meantime you'll live where, may I ask? Your father's in no position, goodness knows, to have a poet son-in-law dumped on his hands. Unless you're planning to live in the rear of the delicatessen, perhaps."
"We've got a three-room cottage in Hubbard Woods. Some time, when you're feeling stronger, I'd like to have you see it. It belongs to Dorn, the landscape painter. He built it when Hubbard Woods was a wilderness. It's got a fireplace that doesn't draw and a sink that doesn't drain and windows that don't fit. It's right on the edge of the big ravine and the very thought of it makes me happy all over. And now I'm going to kiss you, grandma, which I think is awfully sweet of me, all things considered, you dear mistaken old-fashioned darling." Which she did, on the tip of Mrs. Payson's nose.
At the word "old-fashioned" Mrs. Carrie Payson had bristled; then, inexplicably, had slumped without voicing a word in her own defense. She seemed momentarily uncertain, bewildered almost. Still, she did allow herself a last javelin. "'In five years he'll be a famous poet.' That's a sensible reason for marrying a man! Huh!"
"But that's not my reason," Charley explained with charming good humour, "any more than because his hair is sort of red in lights, or his ears a little pointed, or his hands slim and brown or his ties always terrible."