We're not very hungry, Katie," I said. "Some cold meat and bread
and butter, those little potato cakes you make so nicely, some sliced
bananas for Mr. Graham and some coffee--that will be sufficient."

For my own part I felt that I never wished to see or hear of food
again. The silent journey home, added to the events of the day, had
brought on one of my ugly morbid moods.

XI

"I OWE YOU TOO MUCH"

"Bad news, Dicky?"

We were seated at the breakfast table, Dicky and I, the morning after
our trip to Marvin, from which I had returned weary of body and sick
of mind. Tacitly we had avoided all discussion of Grace Draper, the
beautiful girl Dicky had discovered there and engaged as a model for
his drawings, promising to help her with her art studies. But because
of my feeling toward Dicky's plans breakfast had been a formal affair.

Then had come a special delivery letter for Dicky. He had read it
twice, and was turning back for a third perusal when my query made him
raise his eyes.

"In a way, yes," he said slowly. Then after a pause. "Read it." He
held out the letter.

It was postmarked Detroit. The writing reminded me of my mother; it
was the hand of a woman of the older generation.

I, too, read the letter twice before making any comment upon it. I
wondered if Dicky's second reading had been for the same purpose as
mine--to gain time to think.

I was stunned by the letter. I had never contemplated the possibility
of Dicky's mother living with us, and here she was calmly inviting
herself to make her home with us. For years she had made her home with
her childless daughter and namesake, Harriet, whose husband was one of
the most brilliant surgeons of the middle West.

I knew that Dicky's mother and sister had spoiled him terribly when
they all had a home together before Dicky's father died. The first
thought that came to me was that Dicky's whims alone were hard enough
to humor, but when I had both him and his mother to consider our home
life would hardly be worth the living.

I knew and resented also the fact that Dicky's mother and sisters
disapproved of his marriage to me. In one of Dicky's careless
confidences I had gleaned that his mother's choice for him had been
made long ago, and that he had disappointed her by not marrying a
friend of his sister.

I felt as if I were in a trap. To have to live and treat with
daughterly deference a woman who I knew so disliked me that she
refused to atten