He cleared his throat, and began to draw patterns on the blotter with one of the pencils scattered over the table. “Well, but after all, Faith!” he said. “Clay must do something, mustn’t he? You’ll have him living at home, too, if he comes to me. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Her eyes filled with tears. “If everything were different! Not as things are. He hates it at home. He doesn’t get on with Adam, and his stepbrothers are horrid to him. They don’t understand how anyone can be more sensitive than themselves. I’ve suffered from their absolute unfeelingness all my life, and I’m determined Clay shan’t be sacrificed as I was!”
The conversation seemed to Clifford to be soaring towards an elevated plane which he, a plain man, could not aspire to. He said in a soothing way: “Well, if he finds he doesn’t like law, after he’s given it a fair trial, we shall have to think of something else.”
“If you think that Adam would ever let him leave the firm, once he’d got him into it, you don’t know him!” exclaimed Faith.
“Well, well, a great many things may happen to alter circumstances, after all! Really, Faith, I don’t think you need...”
“You mean Adam might die,” she said. “He won’t. I know he won’t. He’ll go on for years and years, making us all miserable! Look at his grandfather! He lived to be over eighty, and had all sorts of things the matter with him.”
“Really, Faith!” expostulated Clifford, quite shocked.
She burst into tears. “Oh, I know I ought not to say so, even to you, but if you only knew what I have to put up with, Cliff, you wouldn’t be surprised at my having reached the end of my tether! I could bear it while Clay was safe from Adam’s tyranny, but if he’s to be forced into doing something he doesn’t want to do, and kept down here at the back of beyond, when he’d rather be in London, I simply can’t go on!”
He began to feel very uncomfortable, and wondered how much of this interview was audible to the clerk and the boy in the outer office. Faith’s sobs had, he thought, it peculiarly penetrative quality. He made sympathetic noises in his throat, and was glad to see her making an effort to calm herself.
““Taking him away from college, too, for no reason!” choked Faith, applying her handkerchief to her reddened eyes. “It’s so unfair!”