“They probably didn’t care about her very much.”
“Well—possibly. At any rate, we seem to have come to a full stop for the time being. And I’ve been thinking about the future. I ought to tell you that after my talk with Mrs. Thornburg, the case didn’t seem quite so simple as it had seemed.”
Thornburg, clasping his knee in his hands, was bending upon the floor a gaze darkened by labored thought.
“I’ve begun to feel a kind of moral responsibility. At first I thought only of my own point of view. My family’s, I mean. Our interests and pleasures. But you see there’s also something to be said from the standpoint of our—our guest. I wouldn’t want to lessen her chances of future happiness. I wouldn’t want to have my way altogether and then find out after a while that it had been the wrong way. I never realized before how much the people of the stage are born and not made. That’s the gist of the matter. There will come a time when nothing in the world is going to keep Bonnie May off the stage. That’s my conviction now.”
“They say children do inherit—” interposed Thornburg.
“The question of her future stumps you a bit. It’s not as if she were like any other little girl I ever heard of. It’s like this: I’d like to have a skylark in a cage, if it would sing for me. But I’d never be able to forget that its right place was in the sky. You see what I mean. I don’t want to be wholly responsible for keeping Bonnie May—out of the sky.”
“Well?”
“My ideas aren’t exactly definite. But I want her to be free. I want her to have a part in working things out the way she wants them.”
“That’s good sense. Turn her over to me, then.”
“That’s not the idea at all. I think up to a certain point it may be good for her to experience the—the gentle tyrannies which are part of her life with us. On the other hand, if she becomes identified with you (I don’t know just what other word to use), and you get to be fond of her, why then in a material sense.... Oh, I don’t like the tone of that at all. But you’ll get the idea, and take it for granted that what I’m trying to get at is that I don’t want to stand in Bonnie May’s light.”