“Oh, no, Lanny! I promised him I wouldn't have any debts.”
“Well, don't you think you ought to wait and talk to Marcel at least?” Lanny was growing up rapidly in the face of this crisis.
“Oh, I couldn't do that!”
“But what do you expect to do? Just walk off and leave him? Would that be fair, Beauty? It seems to me it would be dreadfully unkind!”
His mother was staring at him, greatly disconcerted. “Lanny, you oughtn't to talk to me like that. I'm your mother!”
“You're the best mother in the world,” declared the boy, with ardor. “But I don't want to see you do something that'll make us all unhappy. Please, Beauty, don't promise Harry till we've had time to think about it. Some day you may see me making some mistake, and then you'll be begging me to wait.”
Beauty began sobbing. “Oh, Lanny, I'm in such an awful mess! Harry will be so upset — I've kept him waiting too long!”
“Let him wait, all the same,” he insisted. He found himself suddenly taking the position of head of the family. “We just can't decide such a thing all at once.” Then, after a pause: “Tell me — does Harry know about Marcel?” “Yes, he knows, of course.” “But does he know how — how serious it is?” “He doesn't care, Lanny! He's in love with me.” “Well, he oughtn't to be — at least, I mean, he oughtn't try to take you away from us!”
VI
Lanny Budd, in the middle of his fifteenth year, had to sit down and figure out this complicated man and woman business. He had been collecting data from various persons, over a large section of Europe. They hadn't left him to find out about it in his own way, they had forced it upon him: Baron Livens-Mazursky, Dr. Bauer-Siemans, the Social-Democratic editor, Beauty, Marcel and Harry, Edna and Ezra Hackabury, Miss Noggyns and Rosemary, Sophie and her lover — Lanny had seen them embracing one evening on the deck of the Bluebird — Mrs. Emily, who had a leading French art critic as her ami, old M. France and his Madame de Caillavet and his Argentine actress — to say nothing of his jokes about the leading ladies and gentlemen of history, rather horrid persons, some of them. King Louis XV had said to one of his courtiers that one woman was the same as another, only first she must be bathed and then have her teeth attended to.