She shook her head.  “If it were not for his duty to Jacky, I would be glad to have Edith marry him.  And as for saying that she ‘can’t,’ these are not the days, Henry, when fathers and mothers decide whom their girls may marry.”

While his old friends were thus talking him over, Maurice was traveling up to the mountains.  He had seen Mr. and Mrs. Houghton in Mercer several times since Eleanor’s death, but he had not been able to face the associations and recollections of Green Hill.  This was largely because, though his friends had, with such ease, reached decisions for him, he was himself so absorbed in indecision that he could not go back to the careless pleasantness of old intimacies, (As for that question of the wheels,—­“if—­if—­if anything happens to Eleanor?”—­Eleanor herself had answered it in one word:  Lily.) So, since her death Maurice’s whole mind was intent on Jacky.  What must he do fear him?  His occasional efforts to train the child had been met, more than once, by sharp rebuffs.  Whenever he went to see Jacky, Lily was perfectly good humored—­unless she felt she was being criticized; then the claws showed through the fur!

“You can give me money, if you want to, to send him to a swell school.”  She said, once; “but I tell you, Mr. Curtis, right out, I ain’t going to have you come in between me and Jacky by talking up things to him that I don’t care about. All these religious frills about Truth!  They say nowadays hardly any rich people tell the truth.  And talking grammar to him!  You set him against me,” she, said, and her eyes filled with angry tears.

“I wouldn’t think of setting him against you,” he said; “only, I want to do my duty to him.”

“’Duty’!” said Lily, contemptuously; “I’m not going to bring him up old-fashioned.  And this thing of telling him not to say ‘ain’t,’ I say it, and what else would he say?  There ain’t any other word.  He’s my child—­and I’ll bring him up the way I like!  Wait; I’ll give you some fudge; I’ve just made it...”

Maurice, now, on his way up to Green Hill, looking out of the car window, and remembering interviews like this with his son’s mother, wondered if Edith had seen Lily the day she took Jacky home?  That made him wonder what Edith would think of the whole business?  To a woman like Edith it would be simply disgusting.  “I’ll just drop out of her life,” he said.  He thought of the day he brought Jacky to Mrs. Newbolt’s door, and Edith had looked at him—­and then at Jacky—­and then at him again. She understood! Would she understand now?  Probably not.  “Of course old Johnny’ll get her ...  But, oh, what life might have been!”