"He was an attendant in the big club where all the rich business-men go to spend their evenings, and he died when I was a little girl ... have you nothing else to ask about?"
"What was papa's father," Keith ventured after a pause.
"He worked in the royal palace." Again the mother's tone served as a warning, but also as a goad to the boy's curiosity.
"What did he do there," he demanded eagerly.
The lines about his mother's mouth grew tighter and harder, and she spoke as if the words hurt her--but she did not refuse to answer, and she did not send him away:
"He was a lackey."
From the moment he began to speak, Keith had showed an unusual sense for the value and peculiarities of words. They interested him for their own sake, one might say. He treasured them, and he gave more thought to them than to people. The word lackey he had heard before, and he had formed a distinct opinion about it as not desirable.
"Then he was a servant," he blurted out.
"In a way," his mother admitted. "And we are all servants, for that matter. But working in the king's palace is not like--working as Lena does here, for instance."
The last part of her remark went by unheeded by Keith. His thoughts leapt instead to his paternal grandmother--a strict and unapproachable little lady who visited them at rare intervals dressed in a quaint old shawl and a lace-trimmed cap. A great wonder, not unmixed with pleasure, rose in his mind at the thought that her husband had been a sort of servant after all. For some reason utterly beyond him, there was solace as well as humiliation in the consciousness of a stigma, if such it be, that attached equally to both his grandfathers, and not only to his mother's parent. Then a new idea prompted a new question.