"Wonder if I'd better tell you, mother? I'd like to stand well in your good graces—"
"Oh, Champney!"
"Fact, I would. Well, here goes then: I decided—I was lying up under the pines, you know that day I didn't want to accept his offer?"—she nodded confirmatorily—"that if I couldn't have an opportunity to get rich quick in one way, I would in another; and, in accepting the offer, I made up my mind to try for the sister and her millions; if successful, I intended to take by that means a short cut to matrimony and fortune."
"Oh, Champney!"
"Young and fresh and—hardened, wasn't it, mother?"
"You were so young, so ignorant, so unused to that sort of living; you had no realization of the difficulties of life—of love—."
She began speaking as if in apology for his weakness, but ended with the murmured words "life—love", in a voice so tense with pain that it sounded as if the major dominant of youth and ignorance suddenly suffered transcription into a haunting minor.
Her son looked up at her in surprise.
"Why, mother, don't take it so hard; I assure you I didn't. It brought me down to bed rock, for I was making a conceited ass of myself that's all, in thinking I could have roses for fodder instead of thistles—and just for the asking! It did me no end of good. I shall never rush in again where even angels fear to tread except softly—I mean the male wingless kind—worth a couple of millions; she has seven in her own right.—But we're the best of friends."
He spoke without bitterness. His mother felt, however, at the moment, that she would have preferred to hear a note of keen disappointment in his explanation rather than this tone of lightest persiflage.