“He don’t make demands in so many words, ma.  There—­there’s a way those things are done without just coming right out.  I guess you think, when Selma Bernheimer married her baron, he came right out in words and said it had to be two millions.  Like fun he did!  But just the same, you don’t think she could have said yes to him, when he asked her, unless she knew that she—­she could fork over, do you?”

“I tell you in such marriages the last thing what you hear talked about is being in love.”

“Oh, that had nothing to do with this, ma.  The love part is there all right.  You—­you don’t understand, ma!”

“Gott sei dank that I don’t understand such!”

Then Miss Meyerburg leaned forward, her large, white hand on her parent’s knee, her face close and full of fervor.  “Ma dear, you got it in your power sitting there to make me the happiest girl in the world.  I’ll do more for the family in this marriage, ma dear, than all five of the boys put together.  I tell you, ma, it’s the biggest minute in the life of this family if you give—­if you do this for me, ma.  It is, dear.”

“Ja, let me just tell you that your brothers and their wives will be the first to put their foot down on that the youngest should get twice as much as they.”

“What do you care?  And, anyways, ma, they don’t need to know.  What they don’t know don’t hurt them.  Don’t tell them, ma; just don’t tell them.  Ain’t I the only girl, and the baby too?  Haven’t I got the chance to, raise them all up in society?  Oh, ma dear, you’ve got so much!  So much more than you can ever use, and—­and you—­you’re old now, ma, and I—­I’m so young, dear, so young!”

“Ja, like you say, maybe I’m old, but I tell you, Becky, I ’ain’t got the money to throw away like—­”

“Let me let the marquis ask me when he comes to-night, ma.  He’s ready to pop if—­if I just dare to let him, ma.”

“Gott in Himmel, I tell you how things is done now’days between young people.  I should let him ask her yet, she says, like I had put on his mouth a muzzle.”

“It’s no use letting him ask me, ma dear, if I can’t come across like I know the girl he can marry has got to.  Let me let him ask me to-night, ma.  And to-morrow at New-Year’s dinner with all the family here, we’ll break it to ’em, ma.  Mamma dearie!  Let me ask the marquis here to New-Year’s dinner to-morrow to meet his new brothers.  Ma dearie!”

She was frankly pleading, her eyes twilit, with stars shining through, her mouth so like red fruit and her beautiful brows raised.

“So help me, Becky, if I give you the million like you ask and with the Memorial yet to build, I am wiped out, Becky.  Wiped out!”

“Wiped out!  With five sons with their finger in every good pie in town and a daughter married into nobility?”

“I ’ain’t got one word to say against my children, Becky; luckier I been as most mothers; but the day what I am dependent on one of them for my living, that day I want I should be done with living.”