“How can you say that when you showed me just now how well you know me? Wasn’t it just on account of what you thought I might do that you took out the keys as soon as you came in?” Harold’s manner had a way of clearing up whenever he could talk of himself.
“You’re too utterly disgusting--I shall speak to your father,” with which, going to the chair he had given up, his mother sank down again with her heavy book. There was no anger, however, in her voice, and not even a harsh plaint; only a detached accepted disenchantment. Mrs. Brookenham’s supreme rebellion against fate was just to show with the last frankness how much she was bored.
“No, darling mummy, you won’t speak to my father--you’ll do anything in the world rather than that,” Harold replied, quite as if he were kindly explaining her to herself. “I thank you immensely for the charming way you take what I’ve done; it was because I had a conviction of that that I waited for you to know it. It was all very well to tell you I’d start on my visit--but how the deuce was I to start without a penny in the world? Don’t you see that if you want me to go about you must really enter into my needs?”
“I wish to heaven you’d leave me--I wish to heaven you’d get out of the house,” Mrs. Brookenham went on without looking up.
Harold took out his watch. “Well, mamma, now I AM ready: I wasn’t in the least before. But it will be going forth, you know, quite to seek my fortune. For do you really think--I must have from you what you do think--that it will be all right for me?”
She fixed him at last with her pretty pathos. “You mean for you to go to Brander?”
“You know,” he answered with his manner as of letting her see her own attitude, “you know you try to make me do things you wouldn’t at all do yourself. At least I hope you wouldn’t. And don’t you see that if I so far oblige you I must at least be paid for it?”
His mother leaned back in her chair, gazed for a moment at the ceiling and then closed her eyes. “You ARE frightful,” she said. “You’re appalling.”
“You’re always wanting to get me out of the house,” he continued; “I think you want to get us ALL out, for you manage to keep Nanda from showing even more than you do me. Don’t you think your children good ENOUGH, mummy dear? At any rate it’s as plain as possible that if you don’t keep us at home you must keep us in other places. One can’t live anywhere for nothing--it’s all bosh that a fellow saves by staying with people. I don’t know how it is for a lady, but a man’s practically let in--”