"I'm afraid not," he answered absently. "You know she's winding up all those boards and trade-schools and hospitals and things?"
"And a good thing, too," said his sister. "Mamma's done enough for the community. She ought to settle down. And you see she's going to."
"So that's the way it looks to you, Mina?" he asked, looking searchingly into her pale blue eyes, and shrugging his shoulders slightly.
"Gracious, Elliot, if you know so much more about mamma than I do, why don't you ask her to live with you and Maddelina?" she suggested sharply.
"It wouldn't do any good—she'd never think of it," he answered simply.
"Well, of course, she and Maddelina..."
"Exactly," he agreed with his teasing foreign smile.
"And I'll tell you another thing," she went on; "all these sudden trips about the country and to Europe—what is the sense? Mamma will be fifty in a few days, and anything might happen——"
"Oh, nonsense, Mina," he laughed at her. "Mamma is stronger than either of us, and you know it."
"Of course she's never been ill," his sister admitted. "But all this travel makes her nervous, just the same. She's not like herself. Why, yesterday, we drove out through the suburbs—she seems to want to be out doors all the time, you know—and under a big tree there was a camp of those horrid gypsies. The horses were unhitched, and the dirtiest children playing all about, and they were cooking over a fire. Nothing would do but we must stop the horses—the new bays, you know, and they hate anything queer—and mamma actually made quite a visit among them! They were English gypsies, from Sussex, they said. One of the women ladled out some mess or other from the great pot and mamma actually ate it. And it was odd, too, but they wouldn't take any money.