“Oh, gosh!” A wide smile spread over Lanny's face. “That's grand, Beauty! It will tickle Marcel, won't it?”
“Frenchmen are like that,” she answered.
“ALL men are, aren't they?” After a while he inquired: “Was it another accident, or did you decide to do it?”
“Marcel and I decided.”
“It's a grand place to bring up a child, Beauty — I can tell you that.” He kissed her on both cheeks until she cried with happiness and sorrow mingled.
II
It seemed cruel that a youth should be so excited at the idea of leaving his mother; but he couldn't help it, and she understood. To be with Robbie in Paris, and travel on a great steamer, and see that city of New York which he knew from motion pictures, and the marvelous plant of Budd's, the economic foundation of his life. It was a center of his imaginings, a forge of Vulcan a million times magnified, a Fafnir and Fasolt cave where monstrous forces were generated. And to meet that mysterious family, so many of them that you couldn't keep their names straight, and all different and queer. Robbie didn't often talk about them, but behaved as if they were a dark secret. Or perhaps it was Lanny who was the dark secret!
He packed the few things he would take with him; that required only a couple of hours, and he was ready to go on the evening train. Beauty broke down and wept — it was such short notice. He was a mother's darling; and who else would love him as she had? The world was cruel, so many wicked people in it, women especially — she understood their hearts, the cold and selfish ones, the gold diggers, the harpies! So many things she ought to have taught him, and now it was too late, he couldn't remember them; he was crazy with eagerness to get out into that world which seemed to her so full of pain. She gave him many warnings, extracted many promises — and all the time aware that she was boring him a little.
Lanny had a good-by talk with Marcel, and this was more to the point. Marcel had left his family, respectable bourgeois in a provincial town; they had wanted him to be a lawyer, perhaps a judge, and instead he had come to Paris to dab paint on canvas. They gave him a small allowance, but didn't pretend to like his work. “You are lucky,” Marcel said; “your parents are sympathetic, they'll stand by you even if you don't succeed. But don't be surprised if you don't like your relatives. Don't bare your heart to the hawks.”
“What makes you say that?” asked the boy, puzzled.