"'My poor son,' she says, 'I shall allow to go his silly way after this
outrageous bit of double-dealing. I think it useless to strive further
with him. He has not only confessed all the foul details, but he came
brazenly out with the assertion that a man has a right to lead his own
life--and he barely thirty!'
"She goes on to say that it's this terrible twentieth-century modernism
that has infected him. She says that, first woman sets up a claim to
live her own life, and now men are claiming the same right, even one as
carefully raised and guarded as her boy has been; and what are we coming
to? But, anyway, she did her best for him.
"Pretty soon Broadmoor was closed like you seen it to-day. Sister is now
back in Boston, keeping tabs on orchestras and attending lectures on the
higher birds; and brother at last has his orchid ranch somewhere down in
California. He's got one pet orchid that I heard cost twelve thousand
dollars--I don't know why. But he's very happy living his own life. The
last I heard of mother she was exploring the headwaters of the Amazon
River, hunting crocodiles and jaguars and natives, and so on.
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