She could not
save money, but she had the rarer faculty of making it.
She had raised fine fruit and flowers for the
Philadelphia market; she had traded in high breeds of
poultry and cattle, and had invested her earnings
shrewdly. With these successes she had been able to
provide George with money to spend freely at college.
She lived scantily at home, never expecting any luxury or
great pleasure to come into her own life.
But two years ago a queer thing had happened to her. In
an idle hour she wrote a comical squib and sent it to a
New York paper. As everybody knows, fun, even vulgar
fun, sells high in the market. Her fun was not vulgar,
but coarse and biting enough to tickle the ears of the
common reader. The editor offered her a salary equal to
her whole income for a weekly column of such fooling.
She had hoarded every penny of this money. With it she
meant to pay her expenses in Europe and to support George
in his year at Oxford. The work and the salary were
to go on while she was gone.
It was easy enough to hide all of these things from her
son while he was in Cambridge and she in Delaware. But
now? What if he should find out that his mother was the
Quigg" of the New York ----, a paper which he declared to
be unfit for a gentleman to read?
She was looking out to sea and thinking of this when her
cousin, Miss Vance, came up to her. Miss Vance was a
fashionable teacher in New York, who was going to spend
a year abroad with two wealthy pupils.
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