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.
CHAPTER VIII
That night Larry slept on a cot set up in Hunt's studio. Hunt had made
the proposition that Larry consider the studio his headquarters for
the present, and Larry had accepted.
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