was, in the whole confusing experience, the thing that confused Mrs. Lidcote most, that gave her at once the deepest feeling of security for Leila and the strongest sense of apprehension for herself. Yes, there was something oppressive in the completeness and compactness of Leila’s well-being. Ide had been right: her daughter did not need her. Leila, with her first embrace, had unconsciously attested the fact in the same phrase as Ide himself and as the two young women with the hats. “It’s all right, you old darling!” she had said; and her mother sat alone, trying to fit herself into the new scheme of things which such a certainty betokened.
Her first distinct feeling was one of irrational resentment. If such a change was to come, why had it not come sooner? Here was she, a woman not yet old, who had paid with the best years of her life for the theft of the happiness that her daughter’s contemporaries were taking as their due. There was no sense, no sequence, in it. She had had what she wanted, but she had had to pay too much for it. She had had to pay the last bitterest price of learning that love has a price: that it is worth so much and no more. She had known the anguish of watching the man she loved discover this first, and of reading the discovery in his eyes. It was a part of her history that she had not trusted herself to think of for a long time past: she always took a big turn about that haunted corner. But now, at the sight of the young man downstairs, so openly and jovially Leila’s, she was overwhelmed at the senseless waste of her own adventure, and wrung with the irony of perceiving that the success or failure of the deepest human experiences may hang on a matter of chronology.
Then gradually the thought of Ide returned to her. “I chose to think that our case wasn’t closed,” he had said. She had been deeply touched by that. To every one else her case had been closed so long! Finis was scrawled all over her. But here was one man who had believed and waited, and what if what he believed in and waited for were coming true? If Leila’s “all right” should really foreshadow hers?
As yet, of course, it was impossible to tell. She had fancied, indeed, when she entered the drawingroom before luncheon, that a too-sudden hush had fallen on the assembled group of Leila’s friends, on the slender vociferous young women and the lounging golf-stockinged young men. They had all received her politely, with the kind of petrified politeness that may be either a tribute to age or a protest at laxity; but to them, of course, she must be an old woman because she was Leila’s mother, and in a society so dominated by youth the mere presence of maturity was a constraint.
One of the young girls, however, had presently emerged from the group, and, attaching herself to Mrs. Lidcote, had listened to her with a blue gaze of admiration which gave the older woman a sudden happy consciousness of her long-forgotten social graces. It was agreeable to find herself attracting this young Charlotte Wynn, whose mother had been among her closest friends, and in whom something of the soberness and softness of the earlier manners had survived. But the little colloquy, broken up by the announcement of luncheon, could of course result in nothing more definite than this reminiscent emotion.
No, she could not yet tell how her own case was to be fitted into the new order of things; but there were more people—“older people” Leila had put it—arriving by the afternoon train, and that evening at dinner she would doubtless be able to judge. She began to wonder nervously who the newcomers might be. Probably she would be spared the embarrassment of finding old acquaintances among them; but it was odd that her daughter had mentioned no names.
Leila had proposed that, later in the afternoon, Wilbour should take her mother for a drive: she said she wanted them to have a “nice, quiet talk.” But Mrs. Lidcote wished her talk with Leila to come first, and had, moreover, at luncheon, caught stray allusions to an impending tennis-match in which her son-in-law was engaged. Her fatigue had been a sufficient pretext for declining the drive, and she had begged Leila to think of her as peacefully resting in her room till such time as they could snatch their quiet moment.
“Before tea, then, you duck!” Leila with a last kiss had decided; and presently Mrs. Lidcote, through her open window, had heard the fresh loud voices of her daughter’s visitors chiming across the gardens from the tennis-court.
IV
Leila had come and gone, and they had had their talk. It had not lasted as long as Mrs. Lidcote wished, for in the middle of it Leila had been summoned to the telephone to receive an important message from town, and had sent word to her mother that she couldn’t come back just then, as one of the young ladies had been called away unexpectedly and arrangements had to be made for her departure. But the mother and daughter had had almost an hour together, and Mrs. Lidcote was happy. She had never seen Leila so tender, so solicitous. The only thing that troubled her was the very excess of this solicitude, the exaggerated expression of her daughter’s annoyance that their first moments together should have been marred by the presence of strangers.
“Not strangers to me, darling, since they’re friends of yours,” her mother had assured her.
“Yes; but I know your feeling, you queer wild mother. I know how you’ve always hated people.” (Hated people! Had Leila forgotten why?) “And that’s why I told Susy that if you preferred to go with her to Ridgefield on Sunday I should perfectly understand, and patiently wait for our good hug. But you didn’t really mind them at luncheon, did you, dearest?”
Mrs. Lidcote, at that, had suddenly thrown a startled look at her daughter. “I don’t mind things of that kind any longer,” she had simply answered.
“But that doesn’t console me for having exposed you to the bother of it, for having let you come here when I ought to have ordered you off to Ridgefield with Susy. If Susy hadn’t been stupid she’d have made you go there with her. I hate to think of you up here all alone.”
Again Mrs. Lidcote tried to read something more than a rather obtuse devotion in her daughter’s radiant gaze. “I’m glad to have had a rest this afternoon, dear; and later—”
“Oh, yes, later, when all this fuss is over, we’ll more than make up for it, sha’n’t we, you precious darling?” And at this point Leila had been summoned to the telephone, leaving Mrs. Lidcote to her conjectures.
These were still floating before her in cloudy uncertainty when Miss Suffern tapped at the door.
“You’ve come to take me down to tea? I’d forgotten how late it was,” Mrs. Lidcote exclaimed.
Miss Suffern, a plump peering little woman, with prim hair and a conciliatory smile, nervously adjusted the pendent bugles of her elaborate black dress. Miss Suffern was always in mourning, and always commemorating the demise of distant relatives by wearing the discarded wardrobe of their next of kin. “It isn’t exactly mourning,” she would say; “but it’s the only stitch of black poor Julia had—and of course George was only my mother’s step-cousin.”
As she came forward Mrs. Lidcote found herself humorously wondering whether she were mourning Horace Pursh’s divorce in one of his mother’s old black satins.
“Oh, did you mean to go down for tea?” Susy Suffern peered at her, a little fluttered. “Leila sent me up to keep you company. She thought it would be cozier for you to stay here. She was afraid you were feeling rather tired.”
“I was; but I’ve had the whole afternoon to rest in. And this wonderful sofa to help me.”
“Leila told me to tell you that she’d rush up for a minute before dinner, after everybody had arrived; but the train is always dreadfully late. She’s in despair at not giving you a sitting-room; she wanted to know if I thought you really minded.”
“Of course I don’t mind. It’s not like Leila to think I should.” Mrs. Lidcote drew aside
