"You mean school-girl chatter."
"Both. Your mother is in a very serious predicament. We must help her."
He became quite serious. "I wish you would advise me. You know so much
more about the whole subject than I do. I'm eager to get to work on the
books. I suppose it is too much to expect that they will come up
to-day?"
"They might. I'll go and inquire."
"No indeed, let me go. Am I not an inmate here?" He disappeared into the
house, leaving her to muse on his face. He began to interest her, this
passionate, self-willed, moody youth. She perceived in him the soul of
the conqueror. His swift change of temper, his union of sport-loving boy
and ambitious man made him as interesting as a play. "He'll make his
way," she decided, using the vague terms of prophecy into which a girl
falls when regarding the future of a young man. It's all so delightfully
mysterious, this path of the youth who makes his way upward to success.
A shout announced his return, and looking up she perceived him bearing
down upon her with an armful of books.
"Here they are!" he exulted. "Red ones, blue ones, brown ones--which
shall we begin on?"
"Blue--that's my color."
"Agreed! Blue it is." He dumped them all down on the wide, swinging
couch and fell to turning them over. "Dark blue or light blue?"
"Dark blue."
He picked up a fat volume. "_Mysterious Psychic Forces._ Know this
tome?"
"Oh yes, indeed! It's wonderfully interesting."
"I choose it! This color scheme simplifies things. Now, here's
another--_The Dual Personality_. How's that?"
"Um! Well--pretty good."
"_Dual Personality_ to the rear. Here's a brown book--_Metaphysical
Phenomena_."
"That's a good one, too."
"I'm sorry they didn't bind it in blue--and here's a measly, yellow,
paper-bound book in some foreign language--Italian, I guess, author,
Morselli."
"Oh, that's a book I want to read. Let me take it?"
"Do you read Italian?"
"After a fashion."
"Then I engage you at once to translate that book to me. What is it all
about?"
He abandoned his seat on the couch and drew a chair close to hers.
"Begin at the first page and read very slowly all the way through. I
wish it were a three volume edition."