"What can you know of the value of jewels—you, a crude boy who has been nowhere, seen nothing?"
Piers's eyes grew prominent. "I should like to know what you've seen and done?" he inquired, sarcastically. "You spent nearly twenty years trying to make up your mind to marry your next-door neighbour."
Meg burst into tears, and the baby, hearing her mother cry, put her kid slippers in the air and wept with all her might.
Above the noise Maurice called to Piers: "I won't have you insulting my wife!"
"Make her let my wife alone then!" retorted Piers.
Augusta boomed: "Is it our duty, I wonder, to make an appeal? To settle the matter in court?"
"What's that you say?" asked Nicholas. "I can't hear you for the noise those girls are making!"
"I said I wondered if we should go to law about it."
The sound of crying ceased as suddenly as it had begun. All the heads in the room—they seemed to Finch, sitting guiltily on his ottoman, to have swollen to the size of balloons—turned, as though drawn by a magnet, facing Renny. It was one of those volcanic moments when the entire family shouldered all responsibility upon him. The faces, which had been distorted with emotion, gradually smoothed out as though each had inhaled some numbing incense, and an almost ceremonial hush fell on the room. Renny, the chieftain, was to speak. Goaded, harried, he was to give expression to the sentiments of the clan.
He stood, his hands resting on the table, his red hair raised into a crest as though distraught, and said, in his rather metallic voice: "We shall do no such thing! We'll settle our affairs in our own way without any intervention from outsiders. I had rather give up Jalna than take Gran's will into court! As to her sanity—sane or insane, her money was hers to do what she liked with! I believe she was perfectly sane. I think I never knew a better brain than hers. All her life she knew what she wanted to do—and did it. And if this last act of hers is a bitter pill for some of us, all we can do is to swallow it,
