Yes, she who had so often waited uncomplainingly for hours for her
children, pretending that the clocks were wrong, or the dinner hour
changed, or that the mistake had been hers, was now feeling outraged at
being obliged to wait ten minutes for this governess her brother had so
obstinately insisted on engaging.
"Oh, I won't be a minute, Mrs. Conway," said Pearl, feeling genuinely
sorry to have inconvenienced anyone, but not feeling at all guilty as
Mrs. Conway wanted her to feel.
"Yes, I do hope you'll contrive not to be very long," she said, and
could not understand the cause for a dark look her son gave her as he
pursued his shivering way upstairs.
She went into the sitting room, where her daughter Dorothy was already
waiting. It was not a miracle that Dolly was ready on time, but a
phenomenon to be explained by the fact that she had a bridge engagement
immediately after dinner.
She was a pretty, round-faced girl, rather like her mother, except that
her hair was still a natural light brown, and her eyes were brown too.
She did not raise her head, as her mother entered, from the fashion
paper which she was languidly studying.
"Not a very promising beginning, is it?" said Mrs. Conway. She knew
Dolly would be annoyed and she wished to cut herself off completely
from the guilty one. "Do you suppose she's going to keep us waiting for
dinner half an hour every evening?"
Dolly bent her head to examine a picture of an ermine wrap.
"Oh, well, mother," she said, "what can you expect if you give in to
every whim of Uncle Anthony's?"
Mrs. Conway made a pathetic little grimace--pathetic because it was so
obviously intended to win Dolly to her side--to make the girl feel that
she and her mother had a secret alliance against the world at large.
"You'll find, my dear," she said, "that in dealing with men it's easier
to yield at the moment and find a way out at leisure."
But Dolly, who had not even looked up long enough to see the grimace,
answered with a bitter little laugh, "It may be easier for you, but not
for us. We have to suffer. That's the trouble with you, mother--you
think of no one in the world but yourself."
Her mother did not answer--she could not. Tears rose in her blue eyes.
She had enormous capacity for being hurt. Strangely enough, there was
something in her that drove those she loved to say exactly the thing
that would hurt her most. It had always been so with her husband, and
now it was so with her children.
A misplaced fortitude always led her to hide the fact that she was hurt.
She said now with false gayety, "Well, my dear, I hope some day you
will find someone who loves you even better than I do, then."
"I'm sure I hope so," said Dolly, turning the page.
Her manner suggested that if she could not do that much her life would
indeed be a failure.
Mrs. Conway stepped out on the piazza. That was the way--you gave
up your life to making your children happy, to shielding them from
grief and anxiety, and then they blamed you and hurt you horribly
for something that was not at all your fault. She felt a moment of
resentment toward her brother. Why had Anthony insisted on this silly
plan? She had been too considerate of Anthony's feelings; she ought
to have refused to have a governess at all. It was much wiser in this
world to be stern and cruel. She decided to be stern and to begin with
Miss Exeter, who entered the sitting room at this moment. She was
wearing a plain cream-colored dress out of which her lovely head--all
brown and rose color and gold--seemed strangely bright colored.
"I suppose you're Dolly," she said in her deep warm voice, and held out
an open hand.
Dolly, like most young people, estimated beauty as the best of gifts.
She might have been almost as much captured by Pearl's as her brother
had been, except that her ego was taken up with the outrage of her
being kept waiting--she, the most important person in the house, who
had taken the trouble not only to order dinner on time but--what did
not always happen--to be on time herself.
She rose, and allowing a limp hand to pass rapidly through Miss
Exeter's, she said, "Do let's go in to dinner, mother."
"Yes, indeed," said her mother, coming in rapidly from the piazza. "We
dine at eight, Miss Exeter. Another evening I'm sure you will be on
time."
This was not perhaps a very terrible beginning to a régime of
sternness; but to Durland, just getting down, it appeared one of the
most disgusting exhibitions of slave driving that he had ever heard.
"It is entirely my fault that we are late," he said, giving his mother
a steady, brave look.
She answered irrelevantly, "Why, Durland, how nice you look! Are you
going anywhere this evening?"
"Very likely," he answered coldly. He thought to himself, "Why must she
give Miss Exeter the impression that I look like a cowboy generally?"
He was of course going nowhere.
So, having completely alienated her two elder children--Antonia had
early supper by herself--Mrs. Conway found herself obliged to direct
her conversation to the interloper. She had her revenge, if she had
only known it, by talking about her brother, questioning Miss Exeter
about him. Had he seemed very much rushed? Did he say anything about
his golf clubs? Wasn't it a delightful office? Wonderful! So cool in
summer.
Pearl hazarded that the harbor was very beautiful, and learned that Mr.
Wood's office looked north--up the Hudson. She must be careful.
Durland inquired with a friendly grin whether Uncle Anthony had
frightened her to death.
"Frightened me?" said Pearl, trying to gain time.
"Some people are awfully afraid of him."
"Naughty little boys are," said Dolly.
It always annoyed her to see her brother sitting at the foot of the
dinner table. They had fought about it for five years--whether she as
eldest child or he as the only man in the house ought to occupy this
place of honor.
"I'm not afraid of him," said Durland.
"Oh, are you a naughty little boy?" said Dolly, laughing in an
irritating way.
Mrs. Conway, to avert war, began talking about the day's schedule--the
problem of how to work in a few lessons without interfering with any of
the more important pleasures of her children.
"Antonia first, I think. Wouldn't that be your idea, Dolly--Antonia at
half past nine? Dolly and Durland sometimes sleep rather late--so good
for them, I think--but Antonia is up early. She reads sometimes from
five o'clock. She reads a great deal--everything."
"Quite the little genius, according to mother," said Dolly.
"She is clever," answered Mrs. Conway passionately. "I don't know why
you two are always so disagreeable about your little sister."
"Because you spoil her so, mother," said Dolly.
"Because she's so dirty, mother," said Durland.
Mrs. Conway made this attack a means of aligning herself with her
children against the governess.
"Oh, well," she said, "that is all going to be changed now. Miss Exeter
is going to make us all over. Antonia is to be clean and tidy, though
why in the world your uncle thinks it desirable for a child of eleven
to think of nothing but clothes I can't see. And Durland is to be made
into a mathematician. I suppose I'm very ignorant, but I never could
see what good algebra does a person--all about greyhounds leaping
after hares, and men doing pieces of work at seventy-five cents a day.
I wish I could find some like that. Poor Durland, like so many people
with a creative turn of mind, simply cannot do mathematics."
"More people than creative geniuses are poor at mathematics," said
Pearl genially; and Durland, afraid that she would identify him with
his mother in this ridiculous point of view, looked into those pools of
gray light and said modestly that he was just a dub at problems.
"Then at half past eleven," Mrs. Conway went on, "you'll be free to
take Antonia to the beach--the public beach, where she likes to get a
swim and see her little friends."
"Fight a round or two with her little enemies," said her brother.
"She's only fought once this summer," said his mother. "And I for one
think she was perfectly right. Maud is the most annoying child--ugly
and impertinent like her mother, and very badly brought up."
"Well, that's not a patch on what they think about Antonia," said
Durland, and he turned to Miss Exeter. "Gee, it was great! This Maud
child said something rude about Antonia's bare feet, and she sailed in
and landed her one on the jaw; and they fought so that the nurses and
governesses all ran screaming away and the life-saving men had to come
in and separate them."
Mrs. Conway hated this story about her youngest child.
She rose from table in order to interrupt it, observing that Durland
needn't worry, as now they were all going to be made perfect.
Pearl on the whole felt encouraged. Augusta, with all her efficiency,
could not have swung this job, she thought. It required a solid, almost
irrational good temper, which Augusta did not possess. Mrs. Conway
would have rendered Augusta acid and powerless in one evening. Pearl
was not so efficient in certain ways, but she had good temper and a
robust will.
She and Durland went into the sitting room while Mrs. Conway was
getting Dolly off to her bridge party. Durland did what, alas, men
have been doing for many centuries--he attempted to impress the
object of his affection by doing one of the things most certain to
alienate her. He stood before her, lighting a cigarette, shaking the
match deliberately in the air, his legs rather wide apart. Pearl, who
had sunk into a nice deep chair, sprang up and put her hand on his
shoulder.
"Oh, don't smoke," she said.
Hundreds of women had said that to him. Even the lovely Caroline
Temple--his former love--had said that her parents had forbidden her to
have him at the house on account of his smoking; such a bad example.
"Caroline," he had said quietly, "I simply do openly what all the
others do secretly."
He had not wavered about it. Neither had her parents. He and Caroline
met at the tennis club and at the beach--no longer at her house. But he
had never thought of changing his habits. His cigarette was to him what
a car is to a theatrical star--a symbol of greatness. He was firm now,
even under the pleading of a new idol.
"I'm afraid I can't give it up," he said. "I'm afraid it has too much
of a grip on me for that."
He frowned as one who, looking inward, saw nothing but vice and ruin.
He was disappointed to find that she just let it drop--as if she were
not vitally interested in saving him. But before he had time to commit
the natural mistake of asking her why she did not rescue him from his
worse self, his mother came back into the room.