August was a glorious month for the circle that revolved around Vine
Cottage. Eileen had been wooed by her mother to confession of her
secret engagement, and David had given reluctant consent. He was
too deeply steeped in his own belated bliss to deny any other human
creature the benison of happiness. Hal would be leaving for Brooklyn
the second week in September, and it was only right that the two young
people should spend all their evenings together.
Occasionally they went across the street for a musical feast with Mrs.
Nims--whom society was accepting, since it had been noised abroad
that only three lives stood between her and a peerage. More often
they explored strange highways beneath the starlight. Lary, at home
for brief periods, viewed the situation with equanimity. He had made
many compromises, and this was only a little more galling than some of
the others. He found a modicum of compensation in his father’s sweet
content, and in his mother’s almost pathetic devotion to the woman who
had rounded out his own being.
“She quotes you on every possible occasion,” he told Judith. “If you
advised her to forswear the moral code, she would obey you.”
“It’s a fearsome responsibility,” the woman averred. “What if I should
blunder?”
“You couldn’t make her any less happy than she was when you came.
She says you are better medicine than anything Dr. Schubert ever
prescribed. And she insists it was you who compelled her to go to
Bromfield.”
“Lary, you must have read a story--I don’t recall the title--one of
Pierre Loti’s exotic conceits ... the faithless lover who was tormented
by remorse until he went back to Constantinople and spent a night on
the grave of the woman he had wronged. Do you think some fancy of your
mother’s girlhood has been dispelled by her visit ... perhaps some
illusion shattered by crass reality?”
“I don’t know how to gauge my mother--now less than ever before.”