“Well, really, I’ve never put it to her trustees in that way, and, now I think of it, why I really don’t know. But as Nouna’s father was a soldier, and there’s very little loot to be got in our days, I expect it has rolled down.”
“And you don’t really care how it was got together?”
“Yes, I do, now I think of it. But to tell you the truth, the lawyers have managed things so easily for us that all we’ve been called upon to do is to spend the money, a very elementary process.”
“What a strange thing!”
“Why? By the by, so it is, when one comes to think about it. It’s altogether contrary to one’s personal and traditional experience of lawyers.”
“When mamma married,” said Ella, pursuing her own train of thought, “her money was tied up and fenced round with as many precautions as if poor dear old papa had been a brigand. He often laughs about it, and says she couldn’t buy a pair of gloves without a power of attorney. So that it really does seem very astonishing.”
“It does,” assented George, who, never before having had experience of money in any but infinitesimal quantities, had been much readier to take things for granted than was this granddaughter of a Chicago millionaire.
“What would you do, George, if you found out it had been made by supplying bad bayonets to the English army, or anything like that?” she asked, half-laughing, but not without a secret wonder whether this easy-got gold would turn out to have unimpeachable antecedents.
The question gave George a great shock. He jumped up from the hammock across which he had been sitting, with a white face.
“Good heavens, Ella! What makes you say that?” he asked in a low voice, each word sounding as if it were being ground out of him.