It is astonishing how resourceless are even one's nearest and dearest friends in face of anything really capital.
"Poor Ranny! How ghastly!" Gertrude cried, when she first heard of it, wringing my hand. "But buck up, dear boy. You know how I feel. There is a way out for everything." She spoke, I thought, as though I were in need of ready money.
She was here this afternoon to see the children. Gertrude is no hand with children. They seemed strangely shy of her, a woman, though they literally fell upon the neck of growling, grizzled old Dibdin. They are still subdued by the suddenness of their tragedy, though real sorrow Gertrude tells me, is, thank Heaven, beyond them.
"We'll have to think up a way of disposing of the dear things," she remarked briskly. And though I am myself completely at a loss what to do with them, I cannot say I relished her way of putting it.
"What, for instance, could you suggest?" I inquired dully.
"Schools, Ranny dear, schools," she impatiently answered. "There are homelike places run by splendid women—just made for such cases. Why, even the little one—Jimmie, is it?—How old is he; four?—There are places even for kiddies as young as that."
A heavy confusion, the reverse of enthusiasm, oppressed me.
"You forget, Gertrude," I endeavored as gently as possible to remind her, "Laura confided those children to me with her dying breath—to me—her only relative. Do you think I ought to fling them out at once, God knows where!"
"Good Lord, Ranny!" she cried, flushing with a smile of anger peculiar to Gertrude when she is annoyed. "What a sentimentalist you are at bottom—after all!"
"A sentimentalist—I?" I felt hurt. "Just put yourself in my place, Gertrude, and see how easy such a decision would be for you."