§ i
CLAUDINE had put aside her philosophers that morning, and sat in her little glade, listless and wretched. An insufferable, intolerable summer, a summer altogether wrong and harmful. And inevitably six weeks’ more of it.
“It isn’t right to keep the children here in idleness,” she said to herself. “Healthy, intelligent adults, wasting months and months.... They ought to be doing something. They ought to be busy and useful.... I suppose I got these ideas from poor little Mr. Stephens, but they’re good ideas. There was something very admirable about him....”
She smiled at the recollection of the “nice little beast,” but the smile vanished instantly.
“They’re both so discontented and restless—begging me to take them away. And I can’t do anything! I haven’t any power, any authority! I can’t do the least thing—I can’t even leave this place without Gilbert’s consent....”
A few miserable tears started to her eyes.
“That’s the reason I have no control over them. A mother ought to be wise and firm and—free. But I can’t do what I think ought to be done. I’ve never been able to. I have to argue with Gilbert, or deceive him. That’s what it really is, although I like to call it tact. They ought to go home, and study, or work. They don’t need a holiday! But I can’t make him see that; not possibly. He sneers about ‘a lot of idle women,’ but he won’t let us be anything else.... And the older I get, the more—cowardly I become. I can’t bear to argue and argue with him. I know I can’t win. I haven’t any influence over him. I can’t—charm him, or coax him, and I can’t convince him. He’s so obstinate.”
She clasped her hands.
“Oh!” she cried. “If I could only, only have had my darling Andrée alone, I could have done so much for her! So much! I could have been so wise, so gentle, so patient, that she would have loved me with all her heart! I could have influenced her and helped her—”
She hastily wiped her eyes, ashamed of her emotion.
“How did it happen? Why did I become so helpless? Whose fault is it? Gilbert’s? No, I can’t think that. Other women with husbands just as bad as Gilbert don’t allow themselves to be submerged. It’s my fault; it must be. There’s something wrong with me, some horrible moral weakness.”
Her eye fell upon Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.
“No; they’re no use—only a drug. I call it training my mind, but it’s only trying to dull my feelings. I ought to fight and struggle. I must! I must! I must get hold of my children. Now when Bertie’s coming, when he hasn’t seen me for two months.... I ought to be able to do something with him. He adores me.”
She fell into a reverie upon her incorrigible boy. No doubt that Bertie was lazy, frivolous, and something a little worse—“wild,” her friends called him. And yet she never worried seriously about him. He was so obviously the sort of person who always comes out on top. It was impossible to imagine him defeated. He was the cleverest of all her children, alarmingly clever, and he was also in some ways the finest of them. He had more sensibility than his sisters, more heart. That was the reason she was so shamefully indulgent toward his follies; she was aware, almost by instinct, that they were of no significance.
She decided upon an attitude; she would not be so fond, and full of half-playful remonstrances. No; she would be friendly, but firm and wise; she would show him the significance of life.