“I understood that whole matter of your changed decision about going to Boston. It was so perfectly plain that it was funny. Father didn’t want you to go to the Brodericks. To put it plainly, he’s the rankest kind of snob. He was a little bit afraid you weren’t quite up to their level. He had been crazy for years to be invited there, and the chance was not to be missed. He would have thrown over my own mother in the same fashion if he had played at being a great reformer in her day. I remember, when I was a child, that Fanny and I used to play with two dolls we called king and queen, and we sat them up on a throne and worshipped them; but the king sprang a leak one day and the sawdust came out and that was the end of the king business for me. I was about fifteen when I began to find out that father was stuffed with sawdust. It came about from his title of Colonel. A lot of us boys were bragging one day about what our fathers had done in the Civil War and I had silenced the other youngsters by announcing that my father was so brave that he had been made a colonel, and one of the others came back at me the next day with news he had got at home that my father had never been in the war at all--and it was true! And all this philanthropic work and these meetings he addresses so beautifully--it all comes of the cheapest kind of vanity. It isn’t the thing itself he’s interested in; it’s his own name in the newspapers, the glory of his after-dinner speeches at the Waldorf, and quiet committee meetings at Old Point Comfort about the time the shad are beginning to run, and when it’s nice and comfortable to meet the spring down there, and issue open letters to presidents and governors about any old thing, just so it’s far enough away from home. When they come round and ask father to go in for reform in Pittsburg he can’t hear them talking; he sympathizes with the work, and is annoyed when the muck-raker writes us up, but press of other affairs prevents him, and so forth. The fact is that he’s a coward when it comes to getting out on the firing line to be shot at. He wants the Indians in Wyoming to be protected and the Negro to be educated, but he’s afraid to go up against the gang at home. With cowardice and vanity as the chief elements of his character--bah! you see it all--you don’t need to go into the case any deeper. You thought you were solving all your problems by marrying a fine, chivalrous gentleman, respected and admired by all the world, but you have already got a taste of his real character. He’s begun to leak sawdust. He likes you because you are pretty and gentle and biddable, but chiefly because you listen so charmingly when he talks!” “Wayne, Wayne, you don’t know what you are saying!”