"Tom!"
"Yes, my boy." (I think Dad loved to hear Blakely say Tom almost as
much as I loved to hear him say Elizabeth.)
"Tom, I've got you and Elizabeth into a deuce of an unpleasant
position. I've told you what a fine woman my mother is, and how
she'd welcome Elizabeth with open arms, and now I find I was all
wrong. My mother isn't a fine woman; she's an ancestor-worshiping,
heartless, selfish snob. I'm ashamed of her, Tom. She refuses to
meet Elizabeth."
Chapter Seven
I never was so sorry for anybody in my whole life as I was for
Blakely; I would have done anything to have saved him the bitterness
and humiliation of that moment. As for Dad, he couldn't understand
it at all. That Blakely's mother should refuse to meet his Elizabeth
was quite beyond his comprehension.
"This is very strange," he said, "very strange. There must be some
mistake. Why shouldn't she meet Elizabeth?"
"There is no reason in the world," Blakely answered.
"Then why--?"
"She probably has other plans for her son, Daddy dear," I said. "And
no doubt she has heard that we're fearfully vulgar."
"Well, we ain't," said Dad in a relieved voice; "and as for those
plans of hers, I reckon she'll have to outgrow them.
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