of proper care? Can’t you ever get it into your head that papa’s a sick man? He’s got to have good food and decent treatment.”
And Eliza, confused and disturbed, would answer: “Why, child! What on earth do you mean? I took him in a big bowl of vegetable soup myself, for his lunch: he ate it all up without stopping.’Why, pshaw! Mr. Gant,’I said (just to cheer him up),’I don’t believe there can be much wrong with any one with an appetite like that. Why, say,’I said…”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” cried Helen furiously. “Papa’s a sick man. Aren’t you ever going to understand that? Surely Ben’s death should have taught us something,” her voice ended in a scream of exasperation.
Gant was a spectre in waxen yellow. His disease, which had thrust out its branches to all parts of his body, gave him an appearance of almost transparent delicacy. His mind was sunken out of life in a dim shadowland: he listened wearily and indifferently to all the brawling clamor around him, crying out and weeping when he felt pain, cold, or hunger, smiling when he was comfortable and at ease. He was taken back to Baltimore two or three times a year now for radium treatments: he had a brief flare of vitality and ease after each visit, but every one knew his relief would be only temporary. His body was a rotten fabric which had thus far miraculously held together.
Meanwhile, Eliza talked incessantly about real estate, bought, sold and traded. About her own ventures she was insanely secretive; she would smile craftily when questioned about them, wink in a knowing fashion, and make a bantering noise in her throat.
“I’m not telling all I know,” she said.
This goaded her daughter’s bitter curiosity almost past endurance, for, despite her angry mockery, the mania for property had bitten into her and Hugh Barton as well: secretly they respected Eliza’s shrewdness and got her advice on property into which he was putting all his surplus earnings. But when Eliza refused to reveal her own investments, the girl would cry out in a baffled hysteria:
“She has no right to do that! Don’t you know she hasn’t? It’
