"Romantic! absurd! Great baby!" he muttered, and opened the morning paper—his paper—Ethan's by-and-by.
Ethan had not needed his grandfather's recommendation to abstain from mentioning in any letter to Mrs. Gano that her more and more irregular correspondent had been ill that last severe winter before he came of age, or that he considered himself engaged to be married to a girl older than himself and penniless. Mr. Tallmadge persistently affected to put this last achievement aside as sheer youthful nonsense. But those letters in the misleading hand came to Ashburton Place with irritating regularity. He began secretly to await with no small anxiety Ethan's view of the moral as well as legal liberty conferred by the distinction of being twenty-one. Before that moment arrived, the doctors were agreeing that the young man must not, till his health should be established, spend another Christmas in New England.
"At the end of the Indian summer away with him."
"By all means," said Mr. Tallmadge. "Why wait even for the summer? All he needs is a thorough change."
The old man was thinking—thinking not alone of the health, but ambitiously of the future, of his grandson.
"Where shall I send him?" asked Mr. Tallmadge.
"It doesn't much matter where he is in the summer," the doctors agreed; "but get him south of Mason and Dixon's line next winter."
These insensate medicos had no bowels of political compassion. They must have known well enough that the region indicated was not a part of the world lightly to be recommended to Aaron Tallmadge.
"I'll go and visit my Gano relations," Ethan had said, promptly.
"You'll do nothing of the kind," returned his grandfather. "It's no reason, because you feel the cold here, that I should send you where you'd catch yellow fever and malaria."