"So it would," I agreed. "And, besides, Billy has three brothers and two sisters coming along, and Grisdale père is only moderately well-to-do, as fortunes go nowadays."
Instantly Miss Edith's straight-browed eyes flashed blue fire.
"Money—always and forever money!" she flamed out. "I haven't heard anything else all my life! One would think that heaven itself was paved with it and that the angels wear gold coins for charmstrings. I hate it!"
"Oh, no, you don't," I hastened to say. "It's a good, broad-backed little beast, and you can always count upon it for carrying the load. And Billy will probably have to make his own way, without even so much as a loan of the little beast."
"I don't care! I think it is perfectly frightful the way we bow down and kowtow to your beast—the great god Cash! I'd rather wash dishes and make bread—for two!"
This seemed to be verging toward the edge of things serious. I knew that Mrs. Van Tromp was suffering Billy only because he was so absurdly young as to be supposedly harmless. But if Edith, the healthy-bodied and strong-willed, were even beginning to take notice, there was trouble ahead.
"We can none of us afford to defy the conventions, my dear girl," I cautioned, taking the avuncular rôle she had tried to thrust upon me. "And we mustn't let ourselves get into narrow little ruts. The play's the thing, and we are only a part of the audience—you and I."
"The play?" she echoed doubtfully. "You mean the—the——"
"I mean the great human comedy, of course. It is going on all around us, all the time."
"I don't get you," she said, in the free phrase which may have been her own, or may have been a Billy Grisdale transplantation.