To rehearsals. "You are going with us, Mother?" Roma asked as they rose.
"I think so dear. Your father will want to go to bed early, and I shall
sleep better if I go out. I am going to town tomorrow to pour tea for
Harold. We must get him some new silver, Paul. I am quite ashamed of his
spoons." Harold, the only son, was a playwright--as yet
"unproduced"--and he had a studio in Washington Square. A half-hour
later, Wanning was alone in his library. He would not permit himself to
feel aggrieved. What was more commendable than a mother's interest in
her children's pleasures? Moreover, it was his wife's way of following
things up, of never letting die grass grow under her feet, that had
helped to push him along in the world. She was more ambitious than
he,--that had been good for him. He was naturally indolent, and Julia's
childlike desire to possess material objects, to buy what other people
were buying, had been the spur that made him go after business. It had,
moreover, made his house the attractive place he believed it to be.
"Suppose," his wife sometimes said to him when the bills came in from
Celeste or Mme. Blanche, "suppose you had homely daughters; how would
you like that?" He wouldn't have liked it. When he went anywhere with
his three ladies, Wanning always felt very well done by. He had no
complaint to make about them, or about anything. That was why it seemed
so unreasonable--He felt along his back incredulously with his hand.
Harold, of course, was a trial; but among all his business friends, he
knew scarcely one who had a promising boy. The house was so still that
Wanning could hear a faint, metallic tinkle from the butler's pantry.
Old Sam was washing up the silver, which he put away himself ev
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