"It's to be expected. A boy can't shake off his inheritance overnight, can he? Can he?"
"No, I suppose not, dear."
"Don't let on, Lilly. He's sensitive. We'll win yet, Harry and me will. The world hasn't taken much stock of a poor little basement orphan, but with the kind of mother he had, his grandmother will live yet to see the day that it does take account of him. Harry's right smart with draping and decorating around the house, and if I do say it, when he dresses a window the traffic stops. He's a great one for reading and following up the magazines, too. Smart. I'd stake my all on a boy that has got it in him to treat his grandmother with the gentleness he does. And children! There is not one on the street he can pass for love of them. A boy like that cannot be all bad, can he, Lilly?"
Her eyes magnified with the glaze of tears so that one blink would have overflowed them, Lilly laid her lips to the veiny old hand, her voice down into the lap of blue-checkered apron.
"We mothers—Mrs. Schum—God, how we love to suffer to them!"
"We!"
Her face in the tired old lap, the little room seeming to crowd up with voice, Lilly talked on then, until the little clock inset into a china plate ticked out an hour, and in the kitchen, Harry, with all his old capacity for meekness, lay asleep with his head in his arms and the little dinner cloying on the stove.
"I'm afraid my old brain don't take it all in, Lilly. You mean your mother—father—none of them—know?"
"It isn't for you to understand, dear. The mere telling of it has somehow eased things. We are bits of seaweed, dear Mrs. Schum, tossed up on the same shores. You and your fugitive from environment. Me and mine. If your secret is to be mine, mine must be yours."
"God have mercy on you, Lilly, wherever it is your ways are leading you."