"My dear, you can't think I am capable of joking? But, Milly, look here, I'll tell you one thing: she was mighty sensible about Ned. She thinks there's a good deal to him—"
"I don't need Helen Hayes to tell me that," said Ned's mother.
Tom, who never paused for his wife's reply, was whistling joyfully:
Helen Hayes had been very comforting to him; he had protested, when Ned reluctantly departed, that a boy never knew when to clear out; and Miss Helen had pouted, and said Ned shouldn't be scolded; "I wouldn't let him 'clear out'—so there!" Few women of thirty-two can be cunning successfully, but Tom thought Miss Helen very cunning. "I just perfectly love to hear him talk about his music," she said.
"He can't talk about anything else," Ned's father said. "That's the trouble with him."
"The trouble with him? Why, that's the beauty of him," said Miss Hayes, with enthusiasm; and Thomas said to himself that she was a mighty good-looking girl. The rose-colored lamp-shade cast a soft light on a face that was not quite so young as was the frock she wore—rose-colored also, with much yellowish lace down the front. It was very unlike Milly's dresses—dark, good woollens, made rather tight, for Milly, short and stout and forty-three, aspired (for her Thomas's sake) to a figure,—which is always a pity at forty-three. Furthermore, Helen Hayes's hands, very white and heavy with shining rings, lay in lovely idleness in her lap; and that is so much more restful in a woman's hands than to be fussing with sewing "or everlasting darning," Thomas thought. In fact, what with her lovely idleness and her praise of his boy, Tom Dilworth thought he had rarely seen so pleasing a young woman. "Though she's not so very young, after all; she must be twenty-five," he told his wife.
"She'll never see thirty again."
"Well, she's a mighty nice girl," Thomas said.