Yes, yes; of course I still had him. But---- Well, a _man_ can't understand. CHAPTER VII. A BITTER DISAPPOINTMENT. A boy who is not yet twenty-four, and who has nothing beyond his salary as a clerk in a shipping office, and whose young lady is a pauper, can get engaged if he likes; but he cannot get married. I pointed this out to Harry as soon as he was well enough to be reasoned with. I said to him, "You know, my dearest, that there's nothing in the world I would not do to make you happy, but it would not be making you happy to let you think for a moment of such madness." It appeared, from Tom's account, that the child had been thinking of it--doubtless at Emily's instigation. "I might as well encourage you to cut your throat. Far better, indeed." "Better?" he echoed, lifting his eyebrows, and smiling in that queer way of his. "Better!" I insisted firmly. "You little know what it means--that rushing into irrevocable matrimony without counting the cost--without knowing what it entails--without experience or means----" "Mother," he interrupted, still smiling--a little impudently, though I don't think he meant to be rude--"you were not any more experienced than we are, and not any older or richer, were you?" I replied with dignity that my case was nowise in point. He wanted to know why it was not. I said, because I--unlike him--had been practically homeless at the time. And he cried, "_Were_ you? I never heard of that!" and stared at me in such a way that I blushed hotly, though old enough to know better. He was an obstinate fellow, and he corresponded with his grandfather and young uncles and aunts in England, and had a heap of their autographed photos in his room. I thought I had better turn him over to his father. Tom was walking in the garden with Emily, who had managed to get around him in that innocent-seeming way of hers--well, I must not be uncharitable; I daresay it _was_ innocent, and I could almost have fancied that they did not care about being interrupted. Only, of course, that's nonsense. "My dear," I said, in a sprightly voice, "your young man seems to find his mother a bore these days, and it's only natural. I have been trying to cheer him, and he responds by yawning in my face. Pray do go and exercise your spells, which are so much more potent, and leave me my old man, who is still my own." Was there any harm in a little light chaff of this kind? One would surely think not. But Tom, standing and looking after her as she slipped away, blushing in her ready, _ingénue_ fashion--so unlike a B.A.--said, quite gravely---- "That's a dear little soul, Polly! And I wouldn't speak to her in just that sort of a way, if I were you. It hurts her." "It hurts _me_," I returned, "when _you_ speak in that sort of a way. It is most unjust. Can't you take a joke? You know perfectly well that I treat her with the utmost kindness and consideration--that I have accepted her unreservedly, for my boy's sake."