"I mean Jimsy King, naturally, as you quite well know, Sapphira," he answered, pulling her down beside him on the couch and making her face him.
"Stephen, I don't think Mr. King can afford to send him."
"Then we'll take him."
"Jimsy wouldn't let us. He is very proud,—I admire it in him."
"Do you, my dear? Then, can't you manage to admire some of his other nice young virtues and graces?"
"I do, Stephen. I give the boy credit for all he is, but——"
"But you don't intend to let him marry your daughter if by the hookiest hook and crookedest crook you can prevent it. I observed your Star Chamber sessions with Mrs. Van Meter last year; I saw you wave her and her son hopefully away; I observed, smiling with intense internal glee, that you welcomed them back with deep if skillfully dissembled disappointment. Top Step, God love her, sat tight. Don't you know your own child yet, Mildred? Don't you know the well and favorably known chemical action of absence on young and juicy hearts? Don't you know"—he broke off to stare at her, flushed and a little breathless as she always was in discussions and unbelievably youthful and beautiful still, and finished in quite another key—"that you're getting positively lovelier with each ridiculous birthday—and your aged and infirm spouse more and more besottedly in love with you?"
She did not melt because she was tremendously in earnest. She was pledged in her deepest heart to break up what she felt was Honor's silly sentimentality—sentimentality with a dark and sinister background of mortgages and young widows and Wild Kings and shabby, down-at-the-heel houses and lawns.
"Woman," said Stephen Lorimer, "did you hear what I said? It was a rather neat speech, I thought. However, as you did not give it the rapt attention it merited I will now repeat it, with appropriate gestures." He caught her in his arms as youthfully as Jimsy might have done with Honor, and told her again, between kisses. "You lovely, silly, stubborn thing, kiss your wise husband once more in a manner expressive of your admiration for his unfailing sapience, and he will then, with surprising agility for one of his years, lope across the intervening lawn and tell James King that his son goes to Europe with us in June." He grinned back at her from the door. "You'll do your little worst to prevent it, my dear, that I know, but Jimsy King goes with us!"
Honor and Jimsy wrote each other rapturously on receipt of the news, but they were not fluent or expressive, either of them, and they could only underline and put in a reckless number of exclamation points. "Gee," wrote Jimsy King, "isn't it immense? Skipper, I can't tell you how I feel—but, by golly, I can show you when I get there!"