"The marquis, just let me tell you, ma, is a man of force--he is. Maybe
those foreigners don't always show up, but I've seen him on his own
ground. I've seen him in Paris and Monte Carlo and I--"
"I 'ain't got a word to say against this young man what followed you all
the way home from Paris. What I don't know I can't talk about. Only I
ask you, Becky, ain't it always in the papers how from Europe they run
here thick after the girls what have got money?"
"What are you always running down Europe for, ma? Where did you come
from, yourself, I'd like to know!"
"I don't run it down, baby. I don't. You know how your papa loved the
old country and sent always money back home. But he always said, baby,
it's in America we had all our good luck and to America what gave us so
much we should give back too. Just because your brother Felix and his
wife what was on the stage like such doings over there is no reason--"
"It's just those notions of yours, ma, that are keeping this family
down, let me tell you that--you and Ben and Roody and Izzy and all the
rest of them with their old-fogyness."
"Your brothers, let me tell you, you bad girl, you, are as fine, steady
men as your papa before them."
"We could have one of the biggest names in this town and get in on the
right kind of charities, if you and they didn't--"
"Your papa, Becky, had his own ideas how to do charity and how we should
not give just where our name shows big in the papers. Your brothers are
like him, fine, good men, and that's why I want the Memorial should come
like a surprise, so they can have before them always that their father
was the finest--"
Suddenly Miss Meyerburg flung herself back on her pillows, tears gushing
hot and full of salt. "Oh, what's the use? What's the use? She won't
understand."
"Becky, baby, 'ain't you got everything what money can buy? A house on
Fifth Avenue what even the sight-seeing automobile hollers out about.
Automobiles of your own more as you can use. Brothers nearly all with
grand wives and families, and such a beautiful girl like you with a
grand fortune to--"
"Mamma, mamma, can't you understand there's things that money can't
buy?"
"Ja, I should say so; but them is the things, Becky, that money makes
you forget all about."
"Try to understand, can't you, ma, that the Rosencrantzes are a great
old French family. You know for yourself how few of--of our people
got titles to their names. Jacob Rosencrantz, ma, the marquis's
great-grandfather back in the days when the family had big money, got
his title from the king, ma, for lending money when the--"
"If all of his sons got, like this great-grandson of his asks, one
million dollars with their wives, I should say he could afford to lend
to the king. To two kings!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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