“This financial business has unnerved me,” Jerry confessed when they were alone. “It was a shock.”
“You’ll love it,” Richard commented shrewdly.
“Oh, that’s all right,” she corrected his view-point. “I’m crazy to get into it. I’m not lazy like you. What worries me is mother. She’s getting sleek and fat and silly-minded. Did you see the way she laughed? Like a foolish old woman.... She’s ill. That collapse on the boat meant more than we thought, I fear. I think I’ll have Dr. Sampson drop in for a call. He’s the only man about here who can manage her and prescribe for her without her ever being aware of it. Dr. Sampson can laugh a bone into setting properly, and over the telephone, too!”
“Those Sampsons could always do wonders with bones,” he joked; “remember the historic jaw-bone?”
He told her not to worry about Mrs. Wells, that she was going through a very natural transformation. The old will show age. Jerry must get used to the fact that her mother was sixty years old in years but nearly eighty in performance. No doubt the shock had done its part in making the change abrupt, but there was nothing alarming. The point was, he insisted, to take her at her word before she became querulous—age is not at all consistent; and further, he suggested that she should see the family lawyer and have papers made giving Geraldine complete control of everything.
“Why, how absurd!” she began, but he pointed out to her the consequences to Walter of having an estate on his hands.
“Do you suppose for one minute that you could control him?” he asked.
That sobered her.
“I am not thinking of your mother’s death,” he assured her. “She is the type that lives on into a long peaceful dotage. But I am thinking seriously of what she might rise up some morning and do, just as she did this morning. She might hand over the whole thing to Walter, or present him with a dangerous sum of money.”
“That’s very true,” Jerry agreed. “After this morning I’ll believe anything of her.”