"Never!" protested the poor mother; "but Samuel, my dear—Sammy, my darling—"
The senior warden raised a majestic hand. "Silence, if you please, Eliza." Then he thrust his right hand into his bosom, rested his left fist on the marble-topped centre-table, and advanced one foot. Standing thus, he began to tell his son what he thought of him, and as he proceeded his anger mounted, he forgot his periods and his attitudes, and his voice grew shrill and mean. But, alas, he could not tell the boy all that he thought; he could not tell him of his high ambitions for him, of his pitiful desire for his love, of his anguished fear lest he might be unhappy, or foolish, or bad. These thoughts the senior warden had never known how to speak. Instead, he detailed his grievances and his disappointments; he told Sam with ruthless candor what the world called his conduct: dishonest, idiotic, ungrateful. He had a terrifying string of adjectives, and through them all the boy looked out of the window. Once, at a particularly impassioned period, he glanced at his father with interest; that phrase would be fine in a play, he reflected. Then he looked out of the window again.
"And now," Mr. Wright ended sonorously, "what reply have you to make, sir?"
Sam looked confused. "I beg your pardon, father? I did not hear what you were saying."
Samuel Wright stared at him, speechless.
As for the boy, he said calmly, "Good night, father," and went up-stairs to his own room where he began his packing. The next morning he had gone.
"Where?" asked Dr. Lavendar, when the angry father brought him the news. "I do not know," said the senior warden, "and I do not—"
"Yes, you do," said Dr. Lavendar; "but that's not the point. The point is that it doesn't really matter, except for our comfort, whether we know or not. Sam is a man, and our protection is an impertinence. He's taking a dive on his own account. And as I look at it, he has a right to. But he'll come up for breath, and then we'll get some information. And he'll get some sense."
But of course the Wright family was in a most distressed state. The mother was overwhelmed with anxious grief; the father was consumed with mortification and blazing with anger.
"He didn't take his second-weight flannels," moaned Mrs. Wright; "he will catch cold. Oh, where is he? And nobody knows how to cook his hominy for him but our Betsy. Oh, my boy!"