Once more the rarely heard voice of the Duchess sounded, and though thin it had a positive quality: 

“You’re not going to take any job at first.  First thing, you’re going to give all your time to those private lessons.”

Larry gazed at the Duchess, surprised by the tone in which she spoke.  “But, grandmother, these lessons cost money.  And I didn’t have a thin dime left when my lawyers finished with me.”

“I’ve got plenty of money—­and it’s yours.  And the money you get from me will be honest money, too; the interest on loans made in my pawnshop is honest all right.  It’ll be better, anyhow, for you to be out in the world a few days, getting used to it, before you take a job.”

“Why, grandmother!”

The explanation seemed bald and inadequate, but Larry did not know what else to say, he was so taken aback.  The Duchess, as far as he had been able to see, had never shown much interest in him.  And now, unless he was mistaken, there was something very much like emotion quavering in her thin voice and shining in her old eyes.

“I don’t interfere with what people want to do,” she continued—­“but, Larry, I’m glad you’ve decided to go straight.”

And then the Duchess went on to make the longest speech that any living person had ever heard issue from her lips, and to reveal more than had yet been heard of that unmysterious mystery which lived within her shriveled, misshapen figure: 

“That’s what made me interested in Joe Ellison’s story—­his wanting to get his child clear of the life he was living; though I didn’t know he had any such ideas till you told me.  Larry, I couldn’t get out of this life myself; I was part of it, I belonged to it.  But I felt the same as Joe Ellison, and over forty years ago I got your mother out of it, and your mother never came back to it.  I did that much.  After she died it made me sick when you, all I’ve got left, began to go crooked.  But I had no control over you; I couldn’t do anything.  So I’m glad that at last you’re going to go straight.  I’m glad, Larry!”

The emotion that had given her voice a strange and increasing vibrance, was suddenly brought under control or snuffed out; and she added in her usual thin, mechanical tone:  “The money will be ready for you in the morning.”

Startled and embarrassed by this outbreak of things long hidden beneath the dust in the secret chambers of her being, and wishing to avoid the further embarrassment of thanks, the Duchess turned quickly and awkwardly back to her desk, and her bent old body became fixed above her figures.  In a moment the ever-alert Hunt had out the little block of drawing-paper he always carried in a pocket, and with swift, eager strokes he was sketching the outline of that bent, shrunken shape that had subsided so swiftly from emotion to the commonplace.

Larry gazed at the Duchess in silent bewilderment.  He had thought he had known his grandmother.  He was now realizing that perhaps he did not know his grandmother at all.