Ailie laughed again. “Dear, dear Bell!” she said, “it sounds quite Scotch. A devotion to the dollar is a good sound basis for a Scotch character. Remember there are about a hundred bawbees in a dollar: just think of the dollar in bawbees, and you'll not be surprised that the Americans prize it so much.” “Renegade!” said Bell, shaking a spoon at her. “Provincial!” retorted Ailie, shaking a fork at Bell,
'"Star of Peace, to wanderers weary,
Bright the beams that shine on me.
—children, be quiet,” half-sung, half-said their brother. “Bell, you are a blether; Ailie, you are a cosmopolitan, a thing accursed. That's what Edinburgh and Brussels and your too brisk head have done for you. Just bring yourself to our poor parochial point of view, and tell me, both of you, what you propose to do with this young gentleman from Chicago when you get him.”
“Change his stockings and give him a good tea,” said Bell, promptly, as if she had been planning it for weeks. “He'll be starving of hunger and damp with snow.”
“There's something more than dry hose and high tea to the making of a man,” said her brother. “You can't keep that up for a dozen years.”
“Oh, you mean education!” said Bell, resignedly. “That's not in my department at all.”
Ailie expressed her views with calm, soft deliberation, as if she, too, had been thinking of nothing else for weeks, which was partly the case. “I suppose,” she said, “he'll go to the grammar-school, and get a good grounding on the classic side, and then to the university. I will just love to help him so long as he's at the grammar-school. That's what I should have been, Dan, if you had let me—a teacher. I hope he's a bright boy, for I simply cannot stand what Bell calls—calls—”
“Diffies,” suggested Bell.
“Diffies; yes, I can not stand diffies. Being half a Dyce I can hardly think he will be a diffy. If he's the least like his father, he may be a little wild at first, but at least he'll be good company, which makes up for a lot, and good-hearted, quick in perception, fearless, and—”
“And awful funny,” suggested Bell, beaming with old, fond, glad recollections of the brother dead beside his actor wife in far Chicago.