"Tom!"
"Yes, my boy." (I think Dad loved to hear Blakely say Tom almost as much as I loved to hear him say Elizabeth.)
"Tom, I've got you and Elizabeth into a deuce of an unpleasant position. I've told you what a fine woman my mother is, and how she'd welcome Elizabeth with open arms, and now I find I was all wrong. My mother isn't a fine woman; she's an ancestor-worshiping, heartless, selfish snob. I'm ashamed of her, Tom. She refuses to meet Elizabeth."
Chapter Seven
I never was so sorry for anybody in my whole life as I was for Blakely; I would have done anything to have saved him the bitterness and humiliation of that moment. As for Dad, he couldn't understand it at all. That Blakely's mother should refuse to meet his Elizabeth was quite beyond his comprehension.
"This is very strange," he said, "very strange. There must be some mistake. Why shouldn't she meet Elizabeth?"
"There is no reason in the world," Blakely answered.
"Then why—?"
"She probably has other plans for her son, Daddy dear," I said. "And no doubt she has heard that we're fearfully vulgar."