Her melancholy eyes seemed, from afar, to run over the page. “I don’t remember—but it was so cordial.”
Again he meditated. “That often doesn’t prevent one’s being let in for ten shillings.”
There was more gloom in this forecast than his wife had desired to produce. “Well, my dear Edward, what do you want me to do? Whatever a young man does, it seems to me, he’s let in for ten shillings.”
“Ah but he needn’t be—that’s my point. I wasn’t at his age.”
Harold’s mother took up her book again. “Perhaps you weren’t the same success! I mean at such places.”
“Well, I didn’t borrow money to make me one—as I’ve a sharp idea our young scamp does.”
Mrs. Brookenham hesitated. “From whom do you mean—the Jews?”
He looked at her as if her vagueness might be assumed. “No. They, I take it, are not quite so cordial to him, since you call it so, as the old ladies. He gets it from Mitchy.”
“Oh!” said Mrs. Brookenham. “Are you very sure?” she then demanded.
He had got up and put his empty cup back on the tea-table, wandering afterwards a little about the room and looking out, as his wife had done half an hour before, at the dreary rain and the now duskier ugliness. He reverted in this attitude, with a complete unconsciousness of making for irritation, to an issue they might be supposed to have dropped. “He’ll have a lovely drive for his money!” His companion, however, said nothing and he presently came round again. “No, I’m not absolutely sure—of his having had it from Mitchy. If I were I should do something.”