“We may all have to go sooner than any of us suspect,” she met his gaiety with calm seriousness.
He waited for her to explain.
“If mother’s accounts are half-way right, I couldn’t stay in Yates county,” she explained.
“Oh, they’re not so bad as you think,” he encouraged. “You just let me get at them. I’m a crackerjack on accounts.”
She smiled. “I should think you would be!”
Her smile reassured him. If she knew the truth, he argued, she would not be able to maintain that calm assurance, showing once more that he did not know the Virginia strain. So he found speech to prove what a financial wonder he was. “There are friends of mine in New York,” he said, “who could make any account come out straight. There are thousands of ways of fixing up money troubles. My friends are past-masters in the art They have to be—that’s their business.”
“Can you stand a shock?” she asked quietly.
“If it is an interesting shock,” he answered.
“It is far from interesting,” she went on.... “We owe nearly eighty thousand dollars. We haven’t even been paying the interest on our loans, and it is more than our income; and our yearly expenses are enormous. It looks to me as if the Wells family would have to quit.”
It was indeed a shock. And she had known this for days! That accounted for her preoccupied air and the abrupt leaving of the luncheon table! But what could account for her serene spirit? He asked her bluntly.