He was still puzzled.
"But why England or Russia?"
"Anywhere out of this country."
"He doesn't have to leave this country to get away from a designing
woman."
From her astonished expression, he knew that he had been wrong. She was
not trying to get him away from Marion. From what?
She bent forward, her face set hard.
"What woman?"
Well, it was out. She might as well know it. "Don't you think it
possible, Natalie, that he may intend to marry Marion Hayden?"
There was a very unpleasant half-hour after that. Marion was a parasite
of the rich. She had abused Natalie's hospitality. She was designing.
She played bridge for her dress money. She had ensnared the boy.
And then: "That settles it, I should think. He ought to leave America. If you have
a single thought for his welfare you'll send him to England."
"Then you hadn't known about Marion when you proposed that before?"
"No. I knew he was not doing well. And I'm anxious. After all, he's my
boy. He is--"
"I know," he supplemented gravely. "He is all you have. But I still
don't understand why he must leave America."
It was not until she had gone up-stairs to her room, leaving him
uneasily pacing the library floor, that he found the solution. Old Terry
Mackenzie and his statement about conscription. Natalie wanted Graham
sent out of the country, so he would be safe. She would purchase for
hint a shameful immunity, if war came. She would stultify the boy to
keep him safe. In that hour of clear vision he saw how she had always
stultified the boy, to keep him safe. He saw her life a series of small
subterfuges, of petty indulgences, of little plots against himself, all
directed toward securing Graham immunity--from trouble at school, from
debt, from his own authority.
A wave of unreasoning anger surged over him, but with it there was pity,
too; pity for the narrowness of her life and her mind, pity for her very
selfishness. And for the first time in his life he felt a shamefaced
pity for himself. He shook himself violently. When a man got sorry for
himself--