She turned her face away from him and leaned her head once more upon her hands. He heard her softly murmuring under her breath, with an absent look on her face, accompanied by a still more incomprehensible smile.
“That’s how it stands,” he concluded.
She seemed to have forgotten him entirely, and he caught his breath when she turned about abruptly and said:
“My goodness, how Dan will hate being poor! He will have to sell all his stickpins and his motor cars and all the things he has given me. It will be quite a little to start on, but he will hate it, he is so very smart.”
“Why, you don’t mean to say—” Ruggles gasped.
And with a charming smile as she rose to put their conversation at an end, she said:
“Why, you don’t mean to say that you thought I wouldn’t stand by him?” She seemed, as she put her hands upon her hips with something of a defiant look at the older man, as though she just then stood by her pauperized lover.
“I thought you cared some for the boy,” Ruggles said.
“Well, I am showing it.”
“You want to ruin him to show it, do you?”