Mrs. Savage put on the eye-glasses she wore fastened to a thin chain round her neck, and examined the photograph of Lena McMillan. She looked at it steadily for a long minute, then handed it back to her grandson, removed her glasses, and, without a word, again folding her hands in her lap, looked out of the window.
Under these discomfiting circumstances Dan said, as hopefully as he could, “You’ve changed your mind now, haven’t you, grandma?”
“On account of that picture?” she asked, without altering her attitude.
“Yes. Don’t you think she’s—don’t you think she’s——”
“Don’t I think she’s what?” Mrs. Savage inquired in a dead voice.
“Perfect?” Expressionlessly, she turned and looked at him. “What are your plans, Dan?”
“Well——” He paused doubtfully; “I still hope—I mean, if I don’t have to go to New York to live——”
“So?” she interrupted with seeming placidity. “She declines to come here to live, does she? She hates it here, does she, already?”
“I don’t think she would,” he said quickly. “Not if she once got used to it. You see she doesn’t know anything about it; she’s never been west of Rochester, and she only _thinks_ she wouldn’t like it. I’ve been doin’ my best to persuade her.”
“Oh, I haven’t given up,” he said. “I think when the time comes——”
“But if she won’t, ‘when the time comes’,” Mrs. Savage suggested;—“then instead of living here, where you’ve grown up and want to live, you’ll go and spend your life in New York. Is that it?”
“So you’d do it,” she said, “just to please the face in that photograph!”
“You don’t understand, grandma,” he returned, and he hurriedly passed a handkerchief across his distressed forehead. “You see, it isn’t only Lena herself don’t think much of our part of the country. You see, her family——”
“Ah!” the grim lady interrupted. “She’s got a family, has she? Indeed?”
“Great goodness!” he groaned, “I mean her father and mother and her sister and her aunts and her married sister, and everybody. They’re important people, you see.”
“Are they? What do they do that’s important?”
“It isn’t so much what they do exactly,” he explained, “it’s what they _are_. You see, they’re descended from General McMillan and——”
“General McMillan? Never heard of him. What was he a general of? New York militia? Knights of Pythias, maybe?”