Verrian said nothing, but he reflected with a sort of gloomy amusement
how impossible it was for any woman, even a woman so wide-minded and
high-principled as his mother, to escape the personal view of all things
and all persons which women take. He tacitly noted the fact, as the
novelist notes whatever happens or appears to him, but he let the
occasion drop out of his mind as soon as he could after it had dropped
out of his talk.
The night when the last number of his story came to them in the
magazine, and was already announced as a book, he sat up with his mother
celebrating, as he said, and exulting in the future as well as the past.
They had a little supper, which she cooked for him in a chafing-dish, in
the dining-room of the tiny apartment where they lived together, and
she made some coffee afterwards, to carry off the effect of the Newburg
lobster. Perhaps because there was nothing to carry off the effect of
the coffee, he heard her, through the partition of their rooms, stirring
restlessly after he had gone to bed, and a little later she came to his
door, which she set ajar, to ask, “Are you awake, Philip?”
“You seem to be, mother,” he answered, with an amusement at her question
which seemed not to have imparted itself to her when she came in and
stood beside his bed in her dressing-gown.
“You don’t think we have judged her too harshly, Philip?”
“Do you, mother?”
“No, I think we couldn’t be too severe in a thing like that. She
probably thought you were like some of the other story-writers; she
couldn’t feel differences, shades. She pretended to be taken with the
circumstances of your work, but she had to do that if she wanted to fool
you. Well, she has got her come-uppings, as she would probably say.”
Verrian replied, thoughtfully, “She didn’t strike me as a country
person--at least, in her first letter.”
“Then you still think she didn’t write both?”
“If she did, she was trying her hand in a personality she had invented.”
“Girls are very strange,” his mother sighed. “They like excitement,
adventure. It’s very dull in those little places. I shouldn’t wish you
to think any harm of the poor thing.”
“Poor thing? Why this magnanimous compassion, mother?”
“Oh, nothing. But I know how I was myself when I was a girl. I used
almost to die of hunger for something to happen. Can you remember just
what you said in your letter?”
Verrian laughed. “NO, I can’t. But I don’t believe I said half enough.
You’re nervous, mother.”
“Yes, I am. But don’t you get to worrying. I merely got to thinking how
I should hate to have anybody’s unhappiness mixed up with this happiness
of ours. I do so want your pleasure in your success to be pure, not
tainted with the pain of any human creature.”
Verrian answered with light cynicism: “It will be tainted with the pain
of the fellows who don’t like me, or who haven’t succeeded, and they’ll
take care to let me share their pain if ever they can. But if you mean
that merry maiden up country, she’s probably thinking, if she thinks
about it at all, that she’s the luckiest girl in the United States to
have got out of an awful scrape so easily. At the worst, I only had fun
with her in my letter. Probably she sees that she has nothing to grieve
for but her own break.”
“No, and you did just as you should have done; and I am glad you don’t
feel bitterly about it. You don’t, do you?”
“Not the least.”
His mother stooped over and kissed him where he lay smiling. “Well,
that’s good. After all, it’s you I cared for. Now I can say good-night.”
But she lingered to tuck him in a little, from the persistence of the
mother habit. “I wish you may never do anything that you will be sorry
for.”
“Well, I won’t--if it’s a good action.”
They laughed together, and she left the room, still looking back to see
if there was anything more she could do for him, while he lay smiling,
intelligently for what she was thinking, and patiently for what she was
doing.