Whatever this stalwart youth was, Mary Wing had made him. An orphan and poor, he had been taken to the bosom of the kindly Wings; and Mary, a girl of twenty then, had been from the start his second mother. She had fed and clothed Donald, helped pay his bills at college; she had trained him, taught him, filled him with her own ambition. She had got him his first opening, pulled wires for him, hewed out his ascending steps. Fine and confident as Donald stood there, Mary Wing had made him. And now to see him, as to her, clutching on the toga of the primitive male, to hear him, the ignorant, ridiculously claiming overlordship in a field which should have been supremely woman's.
"Go ahead," said Charles dryly. "Protect her all you want."
But Donald angrily told him not to be an ass. It was a delicate matter—for him—he declared; besides, Mary wouldn't listen to him. He wasn't advanced.
"But you're another matter. You've got some influence with Mary, and—"
"Stop right there! I've got more influence with the Weather Department than I have with Mary Wing."
Glowering at him over the foot of the bed, the engineer demanded reasons for his strange unpractical behavior. Charles offered a few simple selections from his complex feelings.
"First, your cousin's personal behavior is none of my business. Second, I'd have no respect for her if she gave up her principles because you asked me to ask her to. Third, I despise a person who's scared out of his wits by fear of what the neighbors'll think."
Donald appeared momentarily speechless. Perceiving this, the author fitted a cigarette into a holder Mary Wing had given him on his birthday, and resumed his few remarks:—
"Of course your mistake is in supposing that Miss Mary is acting through ignorance. She's acting from principle, as I say, and doing a plucky thing, too. For she doesn't think that because a poor silly girl has once made a mistake, the thing to do—"
But Manford recovered his voice with a bound.