“You?” Latham interjected.
“Me! Good gracious, man, American women don’t obey. Me! I wouldn’t obey Georgie Washington come to life and richer than Rothschild. Obey!” Only an American voice could express such contempt, and no British pen convey it. “But the juries obeyed him all right—as a rule! Those were good days in Chicago. There’s no place like Chicago.”
“So I’ve heard,” Latham admitted.
“But they didn’t last long. An uncle of John’s died out in California, and left us ever so many millions.”
“I say—that was sporting!”
“What was?”
“Leaving his money to you as well as to his nephew.”
“Land’s sake, but you English are funny! Of course Ira Hilary did nothing of the sort. I don’t suppose he’d ever heard of me—though he might if he read the Chicago papers; a dress or two of mine were usually in on Sunday—or something I’d done. But I dare say he didn’t even know if John had a wife. He’d gone to the Pacific coast when he was a boy, before John was born—and he’d never been back East, or even written, till he wrote he was dead. It’s like that in America. Our men are busy.”
“I see,” Latham asserted.
“No, you don’t. No one could who hadn’t lived there. Throw another log on.”