“You see,” Mary said to Bert. “Having her own way and leading him by the nose already.”
Saxon acknowledged the sting.
“Anyway you want, Billy,” she surrendered. His arms tightened about her.
“We'll talk it over first, I guess.”
CHAPTER XIV
Sarah was conservative. Worse, she had crystallized at the end of her love-time with the coming of her first child. After that she was as set in her ways as plaster in a mold. Her mold was the prejudices and notions of her girlhood and the house she lived in. So habitual was she that any change in the customary round assumed the proportions of a revolution. Tom had gone through many of these revolutions, three of them when he moved house. Then his stamina broke, and he never moved house again.
So it was that Saxon had held back the announcement of her approaching marriage until it was unavoidable. She expected a scene, and she got it.
“A prizefighter, a hoodlum, a plug-ugly,” Sarah sneered, after she had exhausted herself of all calamitous forecasts of her own future and the future of her children in the absence of Saxon's weekly four dollars and a half. “I don't know what your mother'd thought if she lived to see the day when you took up with a tough like Bill Roberts. Bill! Why, your mother was too refined to associate with a man that was called Bill. And all I can say is you can say good-bye to silk stockings and your three pair of shoes. It won't be long before you'll think yourself lucky to go sloppin' around in Congress gaiters and cotton stockin's two pair for a quarter.”
“Oh, I'm not afraid of Billy not being able to keep me in all kinds of shoes,” Saxon retorted with a proud toss of her head.