"You must be mistaken, Phil. You must have got the figures wrong. It's more likely a thousand. You know mathematics was never a strong point with you!"
"It's this way, you see, daddy. She made a lot of money—in lucky investments—mines, real estate, and things like that. She told me a little about it; as though it were a great joke. But she is very clever; she did it all by herself—and no one knows it, except just Amy; and she told me I might tell you, so you'd understand. She even said to say to you—" and Phil paused, knitting her brows. To be repeating as from a stranger a message from her mother to her father was a fresh phase of the unreal situation created by her mother's return. "She said to tell you she came by it honestly; that it wasn't tainted money!"
And Phil laughed nervously, not knowing how her father would take this. He seemed depressed, in the old familiar fashion; and she could not know the reason of it, or that the magnitude of his former wife's resources and her wish to divide with her daughter rallied all manner of suspicions round his jealousy.
"She said that either Amy could manage it for me, or that if you liked she would be perfectly willing to turn it over to you. She was very kind about it, daddy; really she was."
"I'm not questioning that, Phil. It's a little staggering, that's all."
"But, of course," she ran on eagerly, "it wouldn't make any difference between you and me. I know you have done everything for me. Please don't ever think I forget that, daddy. And if you have any feeling about it, please say no. I don't want money, just to be having it. We've always agreed that money isn't the main thing in life."
"It's rather necessary, though, as we've found by experience," he replied, with a rueful smile. "I've done pretty badly, Phil; but things are brighter. I'm able now to begin putting some money away for you myself, and I shall do it, of course, just the same. But as to your mother's offer, you must accept it; it's a large sum, far more than I could ever command. It makes you independent; it changes the future for you, puts things within your reach that have been clear out of the question. And it's very generous on her part to tell you to refer the matter to me. I assume," he added, "that she's keeping enough for herself; there might be some difficulty later on if she didn't do that."
"Oh," said Phil, with an unconscious note of pride that did not escape him, "she has plenty; she's richer, I suppose, than almost anybody around here. She didn't ask me not to tell you anything—she's not like that—so you may as well know that she gave Amy a lot of money to help him set up the new bank. It's so funny that I can't help laughing. The whole family—one's aunts, I mean—think she came back to sponge off of Amy, and they don't know she's going to own almost as much as he does in the new Montgomery National. I get to giggling when I see those women strutting by the house with their chins up, but mamma doesn't pay the least attention. I don't believe she thinks about them at all; she's had the house fixed over—pitched a lot of Amy's old furniture into the alley—and is having the garden done by a landscape gardener she imported from Chicago. And those poor women are fretting themselves to death, thinking it's Amy's money she's spending. Yesterday she ordered a seven thousand dollar automobile by telegraph,—just like that!—and when it anchors in front of Amy's gate there'll be some deaths from heart failure in that neighborhood."
Kirkwood's sometime sisters-in-law had been three sharp thorns in his side; and Phil's joy at the prospect of their discomfiture when they beheld their sister rolling about in an expensive motor was not without justification. Lois's prosperity was, however, deeply mystifying. It flashed upon him suddenly that he did not in the least know this Lois of whom Phil had been speaking: she was certainly not the young woman, scarcely out of her girlhood, who had so shamelessly abandoned him. And over this thought stumbled another: he had never known her! As he reflected, his eyes roamed to a large calendar on the wall over Phil's head. This was the 12th of April, his wedding-day. The date interested him only passively; it had long ago ceased to affect him emotionally.
He meant to speak to Nan before he left town and endeavor once more to persuade her that Lois's return had made no difference. As he swung idly in his chair he sought to analyze his feelings. Those little tricks of manner that Phil imitated so unconsciously kept recurring and he tried to visualize the Lois of the present as she must be;—clever, impulsive in her generosities, heedless, indifferent. In all his conjecturing since Christmas he had experienced no longing to have her back; nothing beyond a mild impersonal curiosity as to how time had dealt with her.