"Well, that's what I say. It's his old blinkin', bletherin' morality he's takin' care of, not me. Everybody's got to live like he thinks they ought to, no matter how they hate it. If two Kilkenny cats he knew was to get married and one of them was to bolt he'd fetch her back and tie 'em both up, heads together, so as she shouldn't do it again. And if they clawed each other's guts out he wouldn't care. He'd say they were livin' a nice, virtuous, respectable and moral life.
"What rot it all is!
"Stop her? As if any one could stop her! God knows she can't stop herself, poor girl. She's made like that. I'm not blamin' her."
For, with whatever wildness Ranny started, he always came back to that—He didn't blame her. He knew whereof she was made. It was proof of his sudden, forced maturity, that unfaltering acceptance of the fact.
"Talk of helpin'! Strikes me poor Vi's helpin' more than anybody, by clearin' out like she's done."
That was how, with a final incomparable serenity, he made it out.
But his mother took it all as so much wildness, the delirium, the madness, born of his calamity.
"He'd have been all right if I'd been ass enough to play into his hands and gone blowin' me nose and grizzlin', and whinin' about my misfortune, and let him go gassin' about the sadness of it and all that. But because I kept my end up he went for me.
"Sadness! He doesn't know what sadness is or misfortune.
"My God! If every poor beggar had the luck I've had—to be let off without having to pay for it!"