"Oh, he'll finish Yale all right--"

"Which he would have done anyway, and you KNOW it," Martha charged,
lapsing charmingly into twentieth-century slang.

Bella affirmed her guilt of intention of paying the way of her
school friend's son through college, and added complacently:

"Just the same it was nicer to have Ho-o-la-a pay for it. In a
way, you see, Roscoe is doing it, because it was his judgment I
trusted to when I made the investment." She gazed slowly about
her, her eyes taking in, not merely the beauty and comfort and
repose of all they rested on, but the immensity of beauty and
comfort and repose represented by them, scattered in similar oases
all over the islands. She sighed pleasantly and observed: "All
our husbands have done well by us with what we brought them."

"And happily . . . " Martha agreed, then suspended her utterance
with suspicious abruptness.

"And happily, all of us, except Sister Bella," Bella forgivingly
completed the thought for her.

"It was too bad, that marriage," Martha murmured, all softness of
sympathy. "You were so young. Uncle Robert should never have made
you."

"I was only nineteen," Bella nodded. "But it was not George
Castner's fault. And look what he, out of she grave, has done for