“You approved of it quite as much as I did.”
“Certainly. I am not in any sense blaming you. Besides, Violet did not ask either our advice or our approval. My meaning rather is, that possibly she is paying now for what I own seemed to me at the time a quite amazing courage.”
“She confided in you all that dreadful time far more than she did in me,” said Mrs. North fretfully, and with her pitiful inability to meet her husband when his natural kindness of heart or sense of duty moved him to try to discuss things of mutual interest with her in a friendly spirit. “If you had not taken her away from me then, it might have been different.”
North shrugged his shoulders, and returned to his contemplation of the croquet lawn and Mansfield’s preparations. Violet had never from her babyhood been anything but a bone of contention, unless he had been content never to interfere or express opinions contrary to his wife’s.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“Only show some natural interest in your own child,” she retorted. “But you never can talk anything over without being irritable. And as to her marriage with Fred, we were all agreed it was an excellent thing. Of course if you haven’t noticed how altered she is, it’s no good my telling you.”
“I have noticed it,” said North shortly.
“Well, what do you think we had better do?”
“You really want my opinion?”
North had said this before over other matters. He wrestled with the futility of saying it over this. But he knew that his wife was a devoted, if sometimes an unwise, mother, and he had on the whole been very generous to her with regard to their only child. He sympathized with her now in her anxiety.