But is this not a very heavy strain on you?
Of course your mother and Naida must not be left alone with him; you are the only son, and your place is there.
"Dear, I know what you are going through is one of the most dreadful things that any man is called upon to bear--your father stricken, your mother and sister prostrate; the newspapers--for I have read them--cruel beyond belief! But whatever they say, whatever is true or untrue, Duane, remember that it cannot affect my regard for you and yours.
"If I had a father, whatever he might have done, or permitted others to do, would not, _could_ not alter my affection for him.
"Men say that women have no sense of honour.

I do not know what that sense may be if it falters when loyalty and compassion are needed, too.
"I have read the papers; I know only what I read and what you tell me.

The rules that custom has framed to safeguard and govern financial operations, I do not understand; but, as far as I can comprehend, it seems to me that custom has hitherto sanctioned what disaster has now placed under a bann.

It seems to me that the very men who now blame your father have all done successfully what he did so disastrously.
"One thing I know: no kinder, dearer man than your father ever lived; and I love him, and I love his family, and I will marry his son when I am fit to do it." And again she wrote: "I saw in the papers that the Algonquin Trust Company had closed its doors; I read the heartbreaking details of the crowds besieging it, the lines of frightened people standing there in the rain all night long.

It is dreadful, terrible! "Who are these Wall Street men who would not help the Algonquin when they could?
Why is the Clearing House so bitter?
I don't know what it all means; I read columns about poor Jack Dysart--words and figures and technical phrases and stock quotations--and it means nothing, and I understand nothing of it save that it is all a fierce outcry against him and against the men with whom he was financially involved.
"The papers are so gloomy, so eager in their search for evil, so merciless, so exultant when scandal is unearthed, that I can scarcely bear to read them.