II
Mrs. Lanier was established in a hotel of the sort which Emily had never yet entered. Directly she entered its august portals, she felt herself dwindle again. What were her fur coat and her necklace here? Who was Mrs. Denis Lanier? Nothing at all!
She went up to the desk and told the haughty young man there that Mrs. Denis Lanier wished to see Mrs. Cecil Lanier; and then she waited.
It was the waiting that unnerved her. If some one had come at once, if she had been taken upstairs without delay, her courage might have held out; but to sit there, alone and unregarded, while fifteen endless minutes went by, was too much for her. She began seriously to contemplate running away.
“She’s doing it on purpose—just to be rude and hateful!” she thought. “I won’t stay! Denis wouldn’t want me to stay. It’s humiliating and—”
She was aware then that some one had come up behind her and stopped at her side, looking down at her. What is more, she felt certain that it was a critical, hostile look.
“Very well!” said she to herself. “Go ahead and stare! It doesn’t bother me the least little bit in the world!”
She sat quite still, trying valiantly not to care; but it was unendurable. She felt her face flush. She stirred uneasily, and very soon she turned, to glance up into a pair of glacial blue eyes.
“Is this Emily?” asked the other. “I fancied so.”
Remarkable, the implications that could be put into six short words!
“Yes,” said Emily. “I’m—I am. And you’re—this is Denis’s mother?”
For a moment they regarded each other in silence, and each with the same thought, almost audible:
“I knew you’d be like this!”
Of course Denis’s mother was like this—a handsome, gray-haired woman, tall, rather angular, with a disdainful nose and a faint, chilly little smile. In spite of her queer, stiff, high-waisted figure, her very unbecoming coiffure, her positively ugly black satin dress, she produced an effect of extraordinary magnificence.
“It’s very odd of Denis to go off that way,” she said.
“He couldn’t help it,” returned Emily hotly. “He had to go.”
“Cecil, my younger son, called in at Denis’s office directly we landed, and he was told that Denis had gone away,” Mrs. Lanier went on, without noticing the interruption. “As soon as we had his cable, we arranged to come. It seems to me very odd that he should run off like that! However”—she paused for a moment, looking carefully at Emily—“perhaps we’d better dine upstairs, alone,” she added, “instead of in the restaurant. I know quite a number of people here.”
With burning cheeks and eyes averted, Emily murmured:
“That would be nicer.”
As they walked together toward the lift, she tried to smile, to talk brightly; but she was terribly hurt—even more hurt than angry.
But this was Denis’s mother, a person of supreme importance in his world. He couldn’t help but be influenced by her opinion; so her opinion must be favorable.
“Is it—do you find it comfortable here?” Emily asked politely.
Mrs. Lanier seemed surprised that any one should imagine her comfortable here. She smiled wearily.
“I’ve been in the States before,” she answered. “I dare say I shall do very well for a time. I’m sorry, though, to hear that you and Denis are going to live about in hotels.”
“But we’re not! We’re going to start housekeeping just as soon as he—”
“Denis is very domestic, like his father. I’m sorry to think of his having to live about in hotels,” Mrs. Lanier went on. “However—”
She preceded Emily down a corridor. At the end she opened a door, and they entered a small sitting room.
“We must have a little chat,” said Mrs. Lanier, “before Cecil comes in.”
She took up a packet of letters from the console near her, and began looking over them.
“Let me see,” she said. “Ah, here it is! ‘She is only twenty, and very young for her age,’ Denis tells me. Are you really? And then he says—let me see—‘a remarkably sweet disposition.’ That’s very nice, I’m sure. ‘Her people are thoroughly respectable, decent people, but [Pg 162]they’—well, no matter. ‘She is a very clever and amusing girl.’”
This went on for an intolerable time. Extracts from poor Denis’s letters were read aloud, as if for purposes of comparison with the real Emily, and from time to time Mrs. Lanier asked very direct questions about her parents, her education, her financial position. In the end, Emily had an excellent picture of herself as she appeared to Denis’s mother—a silly, awkward girl, without money or position, who had somehow cajoled a fine young man to his destruction.
She made no attempt to defend herself. She had no great talent for that. She was a sensitive, impulsive creature, quite lacking in self-satisfaction. Moreover, she was very young and inexperienced, and perhaps a little too willing to learn.
She began to think that she really was the contemptible creature that Mrs. Lanier believed her to be. A sense of guilt oppressed her. She sat before her imperturbable judge, pale and downcast, answering the older woman’s questions in a low, unsteady voice.
Presently Mrs. Lanier had an ally in her daughter Cynthia, a cool, casual blond girl, who looked as if she could be beautiful if she liked, but didn’t think it worth trying. Cynthia didn’t ask questions. That, too, she seemed to think not worth trying. She simply began conversations which died at once, because Emily could take no share in them.
There was really no malice in Cynthia—only a measureless indifference to other people and their unimportant feelings. When she discovered that Emily had never set foot in Paris, had never been to the opera or to a race, and bought her clothes in department stores, she saw that poor Denis’s wife was hopeless, and simply stopped talking.
By this time Emily quite agreed with her. The window was open, and Mrs. Lanier had asked her daughter to shut off “that horrible heat.” In a temperature that caused Emily to shiver in misery, those two superior creatures sat in calm comfort.
Very well—if they could endure the cold, in their low-cut frocks, then Emily, in a cloth dress, could also endure it, and would. She would endure their little stinging, icy words, too—every one of them.
In desperation she made an effort to imitate Cynthia’s cool and casual air. A pitiable failure! There was precious little coolness in her strained smile, her faltering words. The last trace of poise had slipped from her. She no longer tried to hold her own, but simply to endure.
“They’ll tell Denis,” she thought, over and over again. “Nothing could really make him change toward me; but oh, this will hurt him so! If only they had waited! Oh, if only they had waited until—until I was a little older and—and had more poise!”
A waiter came in to lay the table, and Mrs. Lanier ordered a dinner of all the things that Emily most heartily disliked—such a cold, flat sort of dinner!
“Cecil should be here by now,” observed Mrs. Lanier, with a glance at the clock. “He promised to make a particular effort to come, on Denis’s account. Poor Cecil!”
Emily wondered in what way she had injured Cecil, that he should be sighed over in this fashion.
It was now after eight o’clock, but Mrs. Lanier decided to wait for the poor boy until half past eight; so there they sat, in the icy room, and all of them silent now. Cynthia had given up, Mrs. Lanier had asked all the questions in her mind, and certainly Emily was not inclined to introduce any topic on her own account. She was stiff with cold, and she fancied her miserable heart was numbed, too. She didn’t care very much about anything.