"
"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.
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