“I am not sure whether I want you to know,” she spoke finally. “There are more entries about mortgages and notes than I care to expose.... Mother seems to have been borrowing like sixty for a great many years, and I haven’t been able to discover yet what she has done with the proceeds.... I am beginning to fear that we are not so well off as I always believed.”
“Would you care much?”
“I don’t know,” she reflected. “I’ve never had to think about money matters. It’s like gravity or the weight of the atmosphere; I don’t suppose we’d miss either unless they should suddenly leave us.... That swim was mighty close to it, though; wasn’t it?” She had shifted the subject adroitly.
“Great!” he lolled at length. “It’s a species of gravity-less universe we were floating in.... Great!”
She had not discovered the state of affairs yet, he thought, although she was “getting warm.” So both were willing to drop the subject, but neither was inclined to bring up another. A minute or two slipped by, then five minutes, then twenty-five. Crickets droned lazily; near by a catbird called, and far off a pack of noisy crows quarrelled and fluttered about the top of a dead tree.
Speech would have kept these two young persons politely apart, but the silence was quivering with intimacies. And so, when Jerry sat up and raised two fingers mischievously, he flashed back the response and walked with her to the water without the necessity of a disturbing word.
Not until they reached the home shore did they speak. Then he said:
“You will let me help you on the books, won’t you? I know a lot about such things”—in reality he knew nothing—“and I know a pack of big finance fellows in New York who will patch up anything in the shape of a note or mortgage or interest due. Do let me help?”
“You really want to?”
“Really.”