“No one could spoil Grace,” Grayling protested.
Grace pondered, anxious for Miss Reynolds’s sake to say nothing stupid. She was the youngest member of the company; they were merely trying in a friendly spirit to bring her into the talk and no wise deliverance would be expected of her.
“I wouldn’t dare speak for all my generation,” she said, “but something has occurred to me. Our elders scold us too much! It isn’t at all pleasant to be told that we’re terribly wicked; that we haven’t any of the fine qualities of our parents and grandparents. We hear nothing except how times have changed; well, we didn’t change them! I positively refuse to be held responsible for changing anything! I took the world just as I found it.”
She had spoken quickly, with the ring of honest protest in her voice, and she was abashed when Judge Sanders clapped his hands in approval.
“That’s the truest word I’ve heard on that subject,” he said heartily. “The responsibility is on us old folks if our children are not orderly, disciplined, useful members of society.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” added Dr. Ridgely.
“Aren’t you the Miss Durland that John Moore talks about?” Mrs. Sanders asked. “I thought so! Isn’t John a wonderful fellow? Since he went into Mr. Sanders’s office we’ve seen him a good deal at our house. He’s so simple and honest and gives promise of great things.”
“I’m very stupid,” said Sanders; “I didn’t realize that I had met the paragon Moore brags about so much; but I might have known it!”
He began describing Moore, and told the whole table how, as trustee of the University, he had become acquainted with the young man and was so struck by his fine qualities that he had taken him into his office. He related some of the familiar anecdotes of Moore and called upon Grace for others. Grace told her stories well, wholly forgetting herself in her enthusiasm. Suddenly her gaze fell upon Mrs. Trenton, whose lips were parted in a smile of well-bred inattention. Grace became confused, stammered, cut short a story she was telling illustrative of John’s kindness to a negro student whom he had nursed through a long illness. Apparently neither John nor his philanthropic impulses interested the author of “Clues to a New Social Order”; or she was irritated at being obliged to relinquish first place at the table. Miss Reynolds, quick to note the bored look on her guest’s face, tactfully brought her again into the foreground. Grace was startled a moment later, when, as the talk again became general, Sanders remarked:
“I believe I’ve met your husband, Mrs. Trenton. He’s a friend of Mr. Thomas Kemp, one of our principal manufacturers.”