The Weymans were finishing dinner at Wild Acres the night of Anne’s and
Glenn’s and Ariel’s visit to the exhibition. Ariel was dining with
Grandam in the attic apartment. Glenn had surprised the others by
announcing his summer plans and the change he had made in them. In
January he had sought and procured for himself a counselorship at a
summer camp for boys in Canada. But now, it seemed, he wanted to get
onto a paper, and without mentioning it to his family he had negotiated
with Mr. Adams, an editor on the _World_, for a job on his staff, and
landed it. It only remained to get out of the counselorship.
But Mrs. Weyman did not look the “rather pleased” that Glenn had so
confidently expected, and as for Hugh,—Glenn thought to himself that old
Hugh was looking deuced funny.
“I don’t quite understand all this raised eyebrow stuff!” Glenn
protested. “If it’s that you don’t want me around so much, well, I can
board in New York, and still save something toward next year’s expenses,
I suppose.”
“Don’t be silly, Glenn!” Mrs. Weyman was looking at him speculatively.
“Anne and I’ll be in Maine, so you won’t be any burden to us, in any
case. There’ll just be you and Hugh and Grandam here. Unless we persuade
Grandam to go with us. But she won’t be persuaded. So it’ll be you
three. Hugh will be glad enough of your company. I was only thinking of
your obligation to the camp. But if it can be arranged—”
“And don’t you see,” Glenn urged, interrupting in his eagerness, “if I
am going into journalism, Hugh, this will be a much more profitable
summer? Enderly put me on to the idea. He thinks it’ll be invaluable as
experience. I’ll be all the sooner self-supporting if I get some
practical experience behind me.”
“All right,” Hugh agreed. “That is, if you can get out of the camp work
honorably. Grandam and you and I—and Ariel will keep house together.
Ariel seems definitely to have made up her mind to stay by Grandam this
summer. Keep her job.”
“Joan Nevin invited her to go to Switzerland with her. Did you know
that, Glenn? And that she refused?” His mother was looking at him oddly.
“Is that why—did she know you’d be here? Did you and she—” Mrs. Weyman
broke off, but Glenn answered as though she had finished her question.
“No, we didn’t,” he said emphatically. But now it was Hugh who thought
that Glenn was looking deuced funny. At any rate it was the first time
he remembered ever seeing his brother blush.
“Has Joan really invited Ariel to Switzerland with her?” Anne exclaimed.
“And she’s not going! Why, Grandam ought to _insist_ on her going. And
you, Hugh! You must make her go. What a chance! It’s just that Ariel is
too unsophisticated to know what it means, I guess. Think of the
contacts! Does she know about Doctor Steiner’s colony? How tremendously
swank it is?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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