“Why, we're not going, are we?” asked Tom, without enthusiasm.
“I was just wondering how you felt about it, now,” she said, with an underlook at her husband.
“Well, if we go back,” said Bella, “I want to live on the Back Bay. It's awfully Micky at the South End.”
“I suppose I should go to Harvard,” said Tom, “and I'd room out at Cambridge. It would be easier to get at you on the Back Bay.”
The parents smiled ruefully at each other, and, in view of these grand expectations of his children, March resolved to go as far as he could in meeting Dryfoos's wishes. He proposed the theatre as a distraction from the anxieties that he knew were pressing equally on his wife. “We might go to the 'Old Homestead,'” he suggested, with a sad irony, which only his wife felt.
“Oh yes, let's!” cried Bella.
While they were getting ready, someone rang, and Bella went to the door, and then came to tell her father that it was Mr. Lindau. “He says he wants to see you just a moment. He's in the parlor, and he won't sit down, or anything.”
“What can he want?” groaned Mrs. March, from their common dismay.
March apprehended a storm in the old man's face. But he only stood in the middle of the room, looking very sad and grave. “You are Going oudt,” he said. “I won't geep you long. I haf gome to pring pack dose macassines and dis mawney. I can't do any more voark for you; and I can't geep the mawney you haf baid me a'ready. It iss not hawnest mawney—that hass been oarned py voark; it iss mawney that hass peen mate py sbeculation, and the obbression off lapor, and the necessity of the boor, py a man—Here it is, efery tollar, efery zent. Dake it; I feel as if dere vas ploodt on it.”
“Why, Lindau,” March began, but the old man interrupted him.