“You can’t do anything. Whistle the children in. There’s a one man show. Stage settings. Italian. I haven’t seen them and you should.” She threw the stick of paint away and set about cheering him. She liked him, muddled in his trade, labouring after beauty, unaware of his own odd sweetness. She gave up the last weeks of the season, guiding him about London, watching him glow when Margot wanted a scarf of orange silk in Liberty’s, when Gurdy demonstrated his Latin, not badly, before a tomb in Saint Paul’s. Margot was the obvious idol, something to be petted and dressed. But the child had a rich attraction of her own, graces of placid curves, a quiet loveliness that missed stupidity. “You don’t like Margot,” Olive told Gurdy in a waste of the British Museum. The boy lied, “Of course I do,” in his cracked voice but Olive took that as the product of good schooling, like his easy performance of airs on the piano. He was jealous of Margot and showed it so often that the woman wondered why Mark didn’t see. But this wasn’t the usual boy. “You let him read anything he likes,” she scolded Mark. “Sure. Where’s the harm? I haven’t got the Contes Drolatiques at the house or any of those things. Aunt Edith used to make me read the Book of Kings when I was a kid. Oh, Gurd knows that babies don’t come by express,” said Mark, “He’s lived in the country, too much.” “I thought the American peasantry entirely compounded of the Puritan virtues, old man.” “You missed your guess, then. You read a lot of American novels, Olive. Some day or other some writer’s goin’ to come along and write up an American country town like it is. The police will probably suppress the book.... My father and Gurdy’s mamma are sort of scared because I’ve got the kid at a rich school. You mustn’t believe all the stuff you see in the American magazines and papers about the wicked rich, Olive. I’ve met some of the rich roués at suppers and so on. Put any of ’em alongside some of the hired men and clerks and things that were in my regiment in Cuba--or alongside Tommy Grover that’s blacksmith at Fayettesville and they’d look like Sunday School teachers. I sort of wish the poor folks in the United States’d leave off yawping about the wicked rich and look after their own backyards a while! No, I don’t take any stock in this country virtue thing. The only girl in Fayettesville that ever run off with a wicked drummer had morals that’d scare a chorus girl stiff. Who’s the fellow that hangs ’round the stage door of a musical show? Nine times out of ten he’s a kid from the country that’s won twenty dollars at poker. Who’s the fellow that--well--seduces the poor working girl? Once in a hundred it’s a rich whelp in a dinner jacket. Rest of the time it’s the boy in the next flat. When I was acting and used to get mash notes from fool women, were they from women on Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue? Not much! Stenographers and ladies in Harlem that had husbands travelling a good deal.