She seated herself on the rail of the veranda, a most undignified attitude for one of her years, and yet, as always, there was a debonair grace about her; something unconquerably girlish.
“I will get a job, Geordie!” she announced. “That’s settled. No matter where I live, I’ll do that. But I want so much to stay here, if you’ll let me stay on my own terms. Let me pay my board[Pg 434] and feel like a nice, independent business woman!”
“No!” he said, again. “I—it can’t be that way.”
“But why, Geordie?” she asked, smiling a little.
And he couldn’t endure her smile; he couldn’t endure her proposal; it was the final straw for his already mutinous and unhappy spirit. If she had any faint idea of what he already suffered from this talk about being “an independent business woman”; if she had imagined what a sore subject that was.
“No!” he said. “If you want to stay here and make mother a visit, you’re more than welcome. But—I don’t approve of women going out to work.”
“What!” she cried. “Oh, but my dear boy!”
There was something in her good-humored protest that made him hot with resentment. She wasn’t laughing at him—and yet, she might as well have been; she couldn’t have pointed out more plainly the absurdity of his words and his attitude. Just by some little inflection of the voice, she made him the youngest twenty-five that ever lived—a boy, a child, a silly, pompous, impertinent young ass.
“I won’t have it!” he said.
She saw her mistake then—she was always quick to recognize her failures—but it was too late to remedy it.