Mrs. Pope, however, refused to be turned aside. “I should hope they were,” she asserted doggedly. “I didn’t come here to discuss the matter, either. I came to ask you to come back to New London with Bobbie at once.”
“What you ask is impossible,” said Donald, without turning. “I shall never go back there again.”
“What! After taking the house for the summer? What will everyone think?”
“It makes no difference to me what they think. It is what I think that concerns me now.”
“You always did think of no one but yourself. Do you expect my daughter to spend the summer there alone? Can’t you see that it is out of the question?” Mrs. Pope was shaking with rage.
“No,” cried Donald, turning on her angrily. “I do not expect her to spend the summer there alone. I expect her to return here to me.”
“To return here!” exclaimed Mrs. Pope, aghast. “To spend the summer in this place! Are you mad?”
“No—I am not. Sometimes I think money has made you so.”
Mrs. Pope paid no attention to his words. She was too busy trying to grasp the full purport of what she had just heard. “What can you be thinking of?” she cried. “Spend the summer here—in this tenement—with thirty thousand dollars a year?”