She seemed doubtful. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “My uncle is going to take me there and he—well, I don’t imagine he would be delighted to have you coming to call. You and I belong to—well, to opposite camps, I guess.... I suppose,” she added, thoughtfully, “if he knew you and I were here together now, this minute, he wouldn’t like it a bit. Probably your grandfather wouldn’t be any better pleased.”
Bob snorted. “Foolishness!” he declared. “That confounded lawsuit is a nuisance. I’m not going to let it chain me, hand and foot. Why should it? Or you, either? If we want to see each other and talk to each other like—well, like this—I say let’s do it. We aren’t old fossils and we aren’t kids either. I told grand-dad so. He isn’t going to send me to Paris, though,” he added, with a chuckle. “Perhaps he might if I had kept at him—he will do almost anything for me when it comes to the pinch—but he doesn’t have to. I have a little money of my own, it comes to me from my mother’s people. I can spend that as I please and I am spending it on my art studies. If you and I should be in Paris at the same time, we will meet over there. I’ll see that we do. Come now, Esther! Say that you’ll see to it, too. Come! let’s promise.”
She did not promise. She was still thinking of the feud between the families. Her conscience was troubling her a little.
“Your grandfather—Mr. Cook—wouldn’t like to have you know me, would he?” she insisted. “Honestly, now?”
“Well—well, perhaps he wouldn’t. But—”
“And my uncle wouldn’t like it at all. Uncle Foster has been so kind to me that—why, I can’t begin to tell you how kind he has been. He is the best man in the world.”
“Oh, say! Look here! He isn’t any better than my grandfather.”
“Bob Griffin! How can you say that?”
“But it is so. They are both good men, I guess. But they had a fight and now they have been fighting so long they think all the rest of creation must fight on one side or the other. We don’t have to fight, you and I, just because they do.”
“But Mr. Cook shouldn’t have brought that suit. He was all wrong and it was wicked of him, Uncle Foster says—”