I am so glad that you have come home all safe and well.

I know that you'll contradict, for your poor mother's sake, all these horrible stories that are worrying her almost to death." "Unfortunately he has just admitted that those stories are substantially true," said the father curtly.
"I won't believe it," sobbed his mother, "until he tells me so himself.
You didn't, did you, back out of a fight, and let that Bob Bennett, whose mother used to be my sewing girl, and whom I supported for months after he was born, and his father died with the cholera and left her nothing, by giving her work and paying her cash, and who is now putting on all sorts of airs because everybody's congratulating her on having such a wonderful son, and nobody's congratulating me at all, and sometimes I almost which I was dead." Clearness of statement was never one of Mrs.Glen's salient characteristics.

Nor did deep emotion help her in this regard.

Still it was only too evident that the fountains of her being were moved by having another woman's son exalted over her own.

Her maternal pride and social prestige were both quivering under the blow.
Harry met this with a flank movement.
"You both seem decidedly disappointed that I did not get myself wounded or killed," he said.
"That's an unmanly whimper," said his father contemptuously.
"Why, Harry, Bob Bennett didn't get either killed or wounded," said his mother with that defective ratiocination which it is a pretty woman's privilege to indulge in at her own sweet will.
Harry withdrew from the mortifying conference under the plea of the necessity of going to his room to remove the grime of travel.
He was smarting with rage and humiliation.