“Dirk, sit down here at the side of my bed the way you used to.”
“I’m dead tired, Mother. “Twenty-seven holes of golf before I came out.”
“I know. You ache all over—a nice kind of ache. I used to feel like that when I’d worked in the fields all day, pulling vegetables, or planting.” He was silent. She caught his hand. “You didn’t like that. My saying that. I’m sorry. I didn’t say it to make you feel bad, dear.”
“I know you didn’t, Mother.”
“Dirk, do you know what that. woman who writes the society news in the Sunday Tribune called you to-day?”
“No. What? I never read it.”
“She said you were one of the jeunesse dorée.”
Dirk grinned. “Gosh!”
“I remember enough of my French at Miss Fister’s school to know that that means gilded youth.”
“Me! That’s good! I’m not even spangled.”
“Dirk! her voice was low, vibrant. “Dirk, I don’t want you to be a gilded youth, I don’t care how thick the gilding. Dirk, that isn’t what I worked in the sun and cold for. I’m not reproaching you; I didn’t mind the work. Forgive me for even mentioning it. But, Dirk, I don’t want my son to be known as one of the jeunesse dorée. No! Not my son!”
“Now, listen, Mother. That’s foolish. If you’re going to talk like that. Like a mother in a melodrama whose son’s gone wrong.. . . I work like a dog.
