"He wasn't talking friendship, mother, and I was furious with him for flunking his exams. He passed in only five out of seven. He ought to have done better than that. He's not stupid; it's that fatal popularity. He's captain of this and manager of that, and they give him such a lot of money. And they pet him, too; they make excuses for him all the time. I told him he must do something before he began to have feelings. The only feeling he had any right to have was shame for his miserable record."
"And that was all the encouragement you gave him?"
"If you call that 'encouragement,'" said Elsie.
"You did very well, my dear; but I suppose you know it was the most intimate thing you could have said to him, the greatest compliment you could pay him. If he ever does make any sort of a record, you have given him the right to come back to you with it."
"He will never come back to me without it," said the girl. "But it was nothing—nothing! All idleness and nonsense, and the music after supper that went to his head."
"I hope it was nothing more than"—Mrs. Valentin checked herself. There were things she said to her husband which sometimes threatened to slip out inadvertently when his youthful copy was near. "Well, I see nothing to be ashamed of, on your side. But such things are always a pity. They age a girl in spite of herself. And the boys—they simply forget. The rebuke does them good, but they forget to whom they owe it. It's just one of those things that make my girlie older. But oh, how fast life comes!"
Elsie slipped her hand under her mother's cloak, and Mrs. Valentin pressed her own down hard upon it.
"We must get aboard, dear. But I'm so glad you told me! And I didn't mean quite what I said about Billy's 'going off mad.' He has given all he had to give, poor boy; why he gave it is his own affair."
"I hope—what I told you—has made no difference about his coming home. It's stupid of me to think it. But hard words come back, don't they, mother? Hard words—to an old friend!"
"Billy is all right, dear; and it was so natural you should be tried with him! 'For to be wroth with one we'"—Mrs. Valentin had another of her narrow escapes. "Come, there is the porter waiting for us."