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Flamingo-like in her bright-coloured, figured gown, with a wild flower in
her hair and her gray curls dancing gently at her temples, a little old
lady trotted up and down the big sitting-room of Slow Down Ranch, talking
volubly and insistently. One ironically minded would have said she
chirruped, for her words came out in not unmusical, if staccato, notes,
and she shook her shrivelled, ringed fingers reprovingly at a stalwart
young man.
Once or twice, as she seemed to threaten him with what the poet called
"The slow, unmoving finger of scorn," he giggled. It was evident that he
was at once amused and troubled. This voice had cherished and chided him
all his life, and he could measure accurately what was behind it. It was
a wilful voice. It had the insistance which power gives, and to a woman
--or to most women--power is either money or beauty, since, in the world
as it is, office and authority are denied them. Beauty was gone from the
face of the ancient dame, but she still had much money, and, on rare
occasions, it gave her a little arrogance. It did so now as she
admonished her beloved son, who at any time would have renounced fortune,
or hope of fortune, for some wilful idea of his own. A less sordid modern
did not exist.
He was not very effective in the contest of tongue between his mother and
himself. As the talk went on he foresaw that he was to be beaten; yet he
persisted, for he loved a joy-wrangle, as he called it, with his mother.
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