But you wouldn't do anything about Marian, and now she's thrown away her chances, and here's this stranger graduating with honors and Aunt Sally going down there to see it! Aunt Sally's going to make a companion of her, and you can't tell what will happen! I'd like to know what you can say to your children when all Aunt Sally's money, that should rightly go to them, goes to a girl she's picked up out of nowhere.

This is what your politics has got us into, Morton Bassett!" The soberness to which this brought him at last satisfied her.

She had freely expressed the anxiety caused by Sylvia's first appearance on the domestic horizon, but for a year or two, in his wife's absences in pursuit of health, he had heard little of her apprehensions.

Marian's own disinclination for a college career had, from the beginning, seemed to him to interpose an insurmountable barrier to parental guidance in that direction.

His wife's attitude in these new circumstances of the return of her aunt's protegee struck him as wholly unjustified and unreasonable.
"You're not quite yourself when you talk that way, Hallie.