National Avenue, Booth Tarkington [8 ebook reader .txt] 📗

naturally in staying away. Young people always say they like to help old people, but it isn’t natural. Mankind are all really just Indians, naturally. In some of the lower Indian tribes they kill off everybody that gets old and useless, and that’s really the instinct of the young in what we call civilization. We old people understand how you young people really think of us.”

“Oh, my!” the young man groaned. “I was afraid you were a little hurt with me, but I didn’t dream you’d feel this way about it.”

“No,” she said;⁠—“you were having too good a time to dream how anybody’d feel about anything. Your father and mother worried some about you, and once or twice your father talked of going East to see what you were up to. They were afraid you were running wild, but I told ’em they needn’t fret about that.”

“Did you, grandma?”

“Yes. Your running wild would never amount to much; you come of too steady a stock on both sides not to get over it and settle down. No; what I was afraid of is just what I expect has happened.”

“What’s that?” Dan asked indulgently. “What do you think’s happened, grandma? Think I got too extravagant and threw away a lot of money?”

“No,” she replied; and to his uncomfortable amazement continued grimly: “I expect you’ve fallen in love with some no-account New York girl and want to marry her.”

“Grandma!”

“I do!” the old lady asserted. “Isn’t that what’s been the matter with you?”

She spoke challengingly, with an angry note in the challenge, and Dan’s colour, ruddy after his walk, grew ruddier;⁠—the phrase “no-account New York girl” hurt and offended him, even though his grandmother knew nothing whatever of Lena McMillan. “You’re very much mistaken,” he said gravely.

“I hope so,” Mrs. Savage returned. “Who was that you were talking to out at my front gate?”

“Martha Shelby.”

“Martha? That’s all right,” she said, and added abruptly: “If you’ve got to marry somebody you ought to marry her.”

“What?”

“If you’ve got to marry somebody,” this uncomfortable old lady repeated, “why don’t you marry Martha?”

“Why, that’s just preposterous!” Dan protested. “The last person in the world Martha’d ever think of marrying would be me, and the last person I’d ever think of marrying would be Martha.”

“Why?”

“Why?” he repeated incredulously. “Why, because we aren’t in love with each other and never could be! Never in the world!”

“It isn’t necessary,” Mrs. Savage informed him. “You’d get along better if you weren’t. Martha comes of good stock, and she’s like her stock.”

“There are other ‘good stocks’ in the country,” he thought proper to remind her gently. “There are a few people in New York of fairly good ‘stock,’ you know, grandma.”

“Maybe a few,” she said;⁠—“but not our kind. The surest way to make misery is to mix stocks. You come of the best stock in the country, and you’ll be mighty sick some day if you go mixing it with a bad one.”

“But good gracious!” he cried, “who’s talking of my mixing it with a⁠—”

“Never mind,” she interrupted crossly. “I know what those New York girls are like.”

“But, grandma⁠—”

“I do,” she insisted. “They don’t know anything in the world except French and soirées, and it’s no wonder when you look at their stocks!”

“Grandma⁠—”

“Listen to me,” she bade him sharply. “The best stocks in England were the yeoman stocks; you ought to know that much, yourself, after all these years you’ve spent at school and college. The strongest in mind and body out of the English yeoman stocks came to America; they fought the Indians and the French and the British and got themselves a country of their own. Then, after that, the strongest in mind and body out of those stocks came out here and opened this new country and built it up. All they’ve got left in the East now are the remnants that didn’t have gumption and getup enough to strike out for the new land. The only thing that keeps the East going is the people that emigrate back there from here in the second and third generations. Don’t you mix your stock with any remnants! D’you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he meekly replied, dismayed not only by the extremity of the discouraging old lady’s view upon “stocks” and “New York girls,” but also by her shrewdness in divining the cause of his long absence. Nevertheless, he ventured to protest again, though feebly. “I think if you could see New York nowadays, grandma, you wouldn’t think it’s a city built by ‘remnants,’ exactly.”

“I don’t have to see it,” she retorted. “I know history; and besides, I was there with your grandfather in eighteen fifty-nine. We stayed two weeks at the Astor House, and your grandfather was mighty glad to get back here to home cooking. Even then all the smart men in New York came from somewhere else. Outside of them and the politicians, the only New York people you ever hear anything about are the ones that have had just barely gumption enough to be stingy.”

“What? Why, grandma⁠—”

“They never made anything; they’ve just barely got the gumption to hold on to what’s been left to ’em,” she insisted. “As soon as anybody gets money, everybody else sets in to try to get it away from him. They try to get him to give it away; they try to trade him out of it, or to swindle him out of it, or to steal it from him. Everybody wants money and the only way to get it is to get it from somebody else; but for all that, the lowest form of owning money is just inheriting it and sitting down on it; and that’s just about all they know how to do, these New York folks you seem to think so much of!”

“But my goodness, grandma!” the troubled young man exclaimed. “I haven’t said⁠—”

She cut him off again, for she was far from the conclusion of her discourse; and he got the impression⁠—a correct one⁠—that during his protracted absence she had been