"You don't say!" remarked the child's grandfather, unmoved. "Everybody here considers him so like the Tallmadges."
Mrs. Gano, with unflattering eyes on the head of the house, gave an incredulous cough. She seemed on the point of expressing more indubitably some further thought, looked at the boy, softened suddenly, and smiled at the grave little face.
He shook his brown curls. A shadow crossed the woman's face.
"Is he never told anything of his father or his father's people?"
"He is very young yet to take an interest in folks he hasn't seen."
"I should have thought an intelligent child of six might have been told that his grandmother--"
"Not six _yet_, madam. Of course, when he is older--"
He made a gesture indicating a liberal policy.
"When he is older you will have no objection, I suppose, to his making a visit to his father's people?"
"No objection whatever to a _visit_, madam."
"How soon should you consider such a move expedient?"
"Ah, that depends," replied the wary gentleman--"depends so much on circumstances."
"What kind of circumstances?" she inquired, stiffly.
His look and tone said unmistakably, "Depends on your behavior, madam." "Depends on the child's health and-- Run away and play, Ethan," he said.
As the little boy closed the door: "Then you do admit he is delicate?"
Mrs. Gano spoke more coldly than when Ethan had been there to hear.
"I admit the need to consider the health of _all_ children, and secondary only to that, their education."
"What are your views as to Ethan's schooling?"
"I shall expect him to go through the regular mill, as I did: a good primary school, then the preparatory at Andover, then Harvard."
The woman felt a certain fainting of purpose at the cut-and-dried programme presented in that dry manner by the dry old man. It _was_ a "regular mill," and who could tell if the sensitive, fragile little Gano was the stuff to stand these machine-made processes?
"I don't believe, myself," said Mr. Tallmadge, with decision, "in haphazard, shilly-shally ways of raising children, and leaving it to them to see what they'll take to."
"I have little experience of shilly-shally methods," replied his visitor.
"If you leave it to boys to decide, what they take to is mischief nine times out of ten."