“The poor child!” murmured the lady.
“Well, she sure is up against it!” growled the son, sitting back with an air of not looking, but taking it all in out of the tail end of his eye the way young men can do.
“And she wants to be an interior decorator!” said the mother, turning from her last look out the little window behind.
“She’s got some task this time, I’ll say!” answered the son. “It may show up more promisingly from the interior, but I doubt it. And you say she’s been to college? Dwight Hall, didn’t you say, where Dorothy Mayo graduated? Some come-down! It’s a hard world. Well, mother, I guess we’ve got to get back or I’ll miss my appointment;” and he gave the chauffeur directions to turn about.
More rapidly they passed this time, but the eyes of the woman took in all the details, the blank side wall where windows ought to have abounded, the shallow third story obviously with room for only one apartment, the lowly neighbors, the dirty, noisy children in the street. She thought of the girl’s lovely refined face, and sighed.
“One might, of course, do a great deal of good in such a neighborhood. It is an opportunity,” she murmured thoughtfully.
Her son looked amused.
“I imagine she’ll confine her attention to the interior of her own home if she does anything at all. I’m afraid, if I came home from college to a place like that, I’d beat it, mother mine.”
His mother looked up with a trusting smile.
“You wouldn’t, though!” she said sunnily, and added thoughtfully: “And she won’t either. She had a true face. Sometime I’m coming back to see how it came out.”