FLAMING
YOUTH
“Absolutely!” she averred.
307
“I won’t look at another
man after we’re married.” “What about that restlessness of the mind, though?”
- All done with. What’s the good? You have more fun
if you’re stupid. . . . You were always wanting me to marry somebody old enough to be my grandfather, Bobs, bu
39
“Ah, yes,” he cut*in grimly.
“Now you’re going to
answer me some questions. How came you to know that, about my wanting you to marry a man over thirty?” “Tf I tell you, you’ll:be paralysed.” “Go ahead. Paralyse me.” “T read it in your letters.” “What letters?” he asked, stupefied. “The ones to Mother. Oh, Bobs, I think they were too flawless. No one but a darling like you could have written them.”
“Wait a moment.”
He put his hand to his head.
His
science-circumscribed world of materialism was toppling about him. “How did you know about them? That I was writing them? Where to find them?” “Mother told me.” “Mona?
Pat, I want the truth.”
“I’m giving it to you. Before she died, when I saw her there in New York, she told me how she had made you promise to write and put the letters in the safe; and the real reason was, not that she thought she would ever come back to read them, but she thought you were the wisest and best man in the world, and she knew how fond
you were of all of us, and she wanted me to know what you thought and be guided by what you said. I suppose she figured that you’d say more about me that way than
you ever would to me.
So you did.”
