“I mean of course in our minds. There will be nothing more interesting these next ten days for our minds to exercise themselves upon.” “Then they’ll get terribly tired of it,” said Mrs. Nettlepoint. “No, no—because the interest will increase and the plot will thicken. It simply can’t _not_,” I insisted. She looked at me as if she thought me more than Mephistophelean, and I went back to something she had lately mentioned. “So she told you everything in her life was dreary?” “Not everything, but most things. And she didn’t tell me so much as I guessed it. She’ll tell me more the next time. She’ll behave properly now about coming in to see me; I told her she ought to.” “I’m glad of that,” I said. “Keep her with you as much as possible.” “I don’t follow you closely,” Mrs. Nettlepoint replied, “but so far as I do I don’t think your remarks in the best taste.” “Well, I’m too excited, I lose my head in these sports,” I had to recognise—“cold-blooded as you think me. Doesn’t she like Mr. Porterfield?” “Yes, that’s the worst of it.” I kept making her stare. “The worst of it?” “He’s so good—there’s no fault to be found with him. Otherwise she’d have thrown it all up. It has dragged on since she was eighteen: she became engaged to him before he went abroad to study. It was one of those very young and perfectly needless blunders that parents in America might make so much less possible than they do. The thing is to insist on one’s daughter waiting, on the engagement’s being long; and then, after you’ve got that started, to take it on every occasion as little seriously as possible—to make it die out. You can easily tire it to death,” Mrs. Nettlepoint competently stated. “However,” she concluded, “Mr. Porterfield has taken this one seriously for some years. He has done his part to keep it alive. She says he adores her.” “His part? Surely his part would have been to marry her by this time.” “He has really no money.” My friend was even more confidently able to report it than I had been. “He ought to have got some, in seven years,” I audibly reflected. “So I think she thinks. There are some sorts of helplessness that are contemptible. However, a small difference has taken place. That’s why he won’t wait any longer. His mother has come out, she has something—a little—and she’s able to assist him. She’ll live with them and bear some of the expenses, and after her death the son will have what there is.” “How old is she?” I cynically asked. “I haven’t the least idea. But it doesn’t, on his part, sound very heroic—or very inspiring for our friend here. He hasn’t been to America since he first went out.” “That’s an odd way of adoring her,” I observed. “I made that objection mentally, but I didn’t express it to her. She met it indeed a little by telling me that he had had other chances to marry.” “That surprises me,” I remarked. “But did she say,” I asked, “that _she_ had had?”