As this could not be denied, it passed without challenge and gaining confidence to venture farther, she presently added, quite casually that a wife was a steadying influence in a young man's career.
Horatio Senior vouchsafed no reply. Perhaps he had no breath left to demur.
At any rate his wife, considering silence a favorable symptom, followed up her previous comments with the declaration that Sylvia Hayden was a nice little thing. This drew fire.
Horatio Senior sputtered something about "nothing but a penniless school-teacher—a nobody."
Very deliberately then Mrs. Horatio began the fourth row of her knitting and as her needles clicked off the stitches, she murmured pleasantly that if she remembered rightly this had been the very objection Horatio Senior's father had made to their own marriage.
At this Horatio Senior flushed scarlet and said promptly that fathers did not know anything about choosing wives for their sons; that his marriage had been ideal; that his Jennie had been the one wife in the world for him; that time had proved it—even to his parents; that she was the only person on earth who really understood him—which latter statement unquestionably demonstrated that all that proceeded out of the mouth of Horatio Senior was not vanity and vexation of spirit.
After this nothing was simpler than to complete the pink stripe and discuss just when Horatio Junior had better start East.
Had Sylvia dreamed when she licked the envelope's flap with her small red tongue and smoothed it down with her pretty white finger she was thus loosing Alton City's thunderbolts, she might, perhaps, have hesitated to send the letter she had penned and perhaps would not have started off so jauntily late that afternoon to post it.
As it was, she was ignorant of the future consequences of her act and went skipping across the wee azure pools the tide had left behind as gaily as if she were not making history.