How?
CHAPTER XXX
But Roberta's return to Lycurgus and her room at the Gilpins' Christmas night brought no sign of Clyde nor any word of explanation. For in connection with the Griffiths in the meantime there had been a development relating to all this which, could she or Clyde have known, would have interested both not a little. For subsequent to the Steele dance that same item read by Roberta fell under the eyes of Gilbert. He was seated at the breakfast table the Sunday morning after the party, and was about to sip from a cup of coffee when he encountered it. On the instant his teeth snapped about as a man might snap his watch lid, and instead of drinking he put his cup down and examined the item with more care. Other than his mother there was no one at the table or in the room with him, but knowing that she, more than any of the others, shared his views in regard to Clyde, he now passed the paper over to her.
"Look at who's breaking into society now, will you?" he admonished sharply and sarcastically, his eyes radiating the hard and contemptuous opposition he felt. "We'll be having him up here next!"
"Who?" inquired Mrs. Griffiths, as she took the paper and examined the item calmly and judicially, yet not without a little of outwardly suppressed surprise when she saw the name. For although the fact of Clyde's having been picked up by Sondra in her car sometime before and later been invited to dinner at the Trumbulls', had been conveyed to the family sometime before, still a society notice in The Star was different. "Now I wonder how it was that he came to be invited to that?" meditated Mrs. Griffiths who was always conscious of her son's mood in regard to all this.
"Now, who would do it but that little Finchley snip, the little smart aleck?" snapped Gilbert. "She's got the idea from somewhere—from Bella for all I know—that we don't care to have anything to do with him, and she thinks this is a clever way to hit back at me for some of the things I've done to her, or that she thinks I've done. At any rate, she thinks I don't like her, and that's right, I don't. And Bella knows it, too. And that goes for that little Cranston show-off, too. They're both always running around with her. They're a set of show-offs and wasters, the whole bunch, and that goes for their brothers, too—Grant Cranston and Stew Finchley—and if something don't go wrong with one or another of that bunch one of these days, I miss my guess. You mark my word! They don't do a thing, the whole lot of them, from one year's end to the other but play around and dance and run here and there, as though there wasn't anything else in the world for them to do. And why you and Dad let Bella run with 'em as much as she does is more than I can see."
To this his mother protested. It was not possible for her to entirely estrange Bella from one portion of this local social group and direct her definitely toward the homes of certain others. They all mingled too freely. And she was getting along in years and had a mind of her own.
Just the same his mother's apology and especially in the face of the publication of this item by no means lessened Gilbert's opposition to Clyde's social ambitions and opportunities. What! That poor little moneyless cousin of his who had committed first the unpardonable offense of looking like him and, second, of coming here to Lycurgus and fixing himself on this very superior family. And after he had shown him all too plainly, and from the first, that he personally did not like him, did not want him, and if left to himself would never for so much as a moment endure him.
"He hasn't any money," he declared finally and very bitterly to his mother, "and he's hanging on here by the skin of his teeth as it is. And what for? If he is taken up by these people, what can he do? He certainly hasn't the money to do as they do, and he can't get it. And if he could, his job here wouldn't let him go anywhere much, unless some one troubled to pay his way. And how he is going to do his work and run with that crowd is more than I know. That bunch is on the go all the time."
Actually he was wondering whether Clyde would be included from now on, and if so, what was to be done about it. If he were to be taken up in this way, how was he, or the family, either, to escape from being civil to him? For obviously, as earlier and subsequent developments proved, his father did not choose to send him away.