第7章

I never was so sorry for anybody in my whole life as I was for Blakely; I would have done anything to have saved him the bitterness and humiliation of that moment. As for Dad, he couldn't understand it at all. That Blakely's mother should refuse to meet his Elizabeth was quite beyond his comprehension.

"This is very strange," he said, "very strange. There must be some mistake. Why shouldn't she meet Elizabeth?""There is no reason in the world," Blakely answered.

"Then why--?"

"She probably has other plans for her son, Daddy dear," I said. "And no doubt she has heard that we're fearfully vulgar.""Well, we ain't," said Dad in a relieved voice; "and as for those plans of hers, I reckon she'll have to outgrow them. Buck up, my boy! One look at Elizabeth will show her she's mistaken""You don't know my mother," Blakely replied; "I feel that I haven't known her till now. It's out of the question, our staying here after what has happened. Let's go up to Del Monte, and let's not wait four months for the wedding. Why can't we be married this week? I'm done with my mother and with the whole tribe of Porters; they're not my kind, and you and Elizabeth are.""Tom, I never felt, that I had a father till I found you. Elizabeth, girl, I never knew what happiness was till you told me you loved me.

My mother says she would never consent to her son's marrying the daughter of a man who has kept a livery-stable. I say that I'm done with a family that made its money out of whisky. My mother's father was a distiller, her grandfather was a distiller, and if there's any shame, it's mine, for by all the standards of decency, a livery-stable is a hundred times more respectable than a warehouse full of whisky. You made your money honestly, but ours has been wrung out of the poor, the sick, the ragged, the distressed. The whisky business is a rotten business, Tom, rotten!""It was whisky that bought an ambassadorship for my mother's brother; it was whisky that paid for the French count my sister married; it was whisky that sent me to college. Whisky, whisky-always whisky!"

"I never thought twice about it before, but I've done some tall thinking today. I'm done with the Porters, root and branch.

Elizabeth and I are going to start a little family tree, of our own, and we're not going to root it in a whisky barrel, either. We're--we're--"