He seemed to be musing over the sadness of things begun and ended all too soon, over a light quenched, a glory gone. Rose found herself passionately anxious to hear more. He had brought her a jewel, a part of her heritage; she might have seen it, but without knowing how bright it was. She was acquiescing, too, in the old spell of his kindness, but never, it seemed to her, so beguilingly administered: for he had come, like a herald accredited by an impeccable authority—the talisman of her mother's name. He was, she thought from his voice, gently amused, even smiling a little to himself.
"You see, Rose, your mother made a bad match. Her people, the few there were, repudiated her. I had no qualifications. I was a poor scribbler, too big, too robust, too everything to suit them. I breathed up all the air. I just went into their stained-glass seclusions and carried her off. They never forgave me."
"Her father died very soon?" She had never referred to the two old people as her grandparents. She found, in her emotional treasury, no right to them, even as a memory. This hesitating question, indeed, seemed a liberty, as it subtly brought them nearer.
"Yes. Your mother was prostrated by that. She had a strong sense of family feeling."
Immediately Rose pictured to herself the wonder of having such clinging tendrils, to aspire upward, and such filaments of root, to mingle with kindred roots in a tended ground. Until now it had seemed to her brave and desirable to walk alone without inherited ties, the cool wind breathing about her, unchecked by walls of old restraint. Now, whether he was gently guiding her thoughts toward his desired ends, or whether some actual hunger in her was impelling them to seek lost possibilities, she did not know; but she was sad. She wanted the spacious boughs of a tree of family life to sit under, to play there and rest. He was continuing,—
"Above all, your mother was a woman of great loyalties, not only to individuals but to her inherited pride. You know that threadbare phrase, noblesse oblige? I can laugh when most of them use it. I never laughed when I saw her cutting her conduct by it."
"I never knew—" She was about to say, in her glowing surprise, that she never knew he cared so much for her mother, or that he had been cherishing such memories.
"That's the reason, my dear," he was saying now, "why you must model yourself on her, and not on me. I don't know that you ever had the least desire to model yourself on me, but I feel very strongly about your knowing what kind of woman she was and letting her—well, letting her decide things for you."
"I wish"—All sorts of longings were choking her and crying for expression; but she could only finish, "I wish she had not died."
"Yes, child. Now these people here, Rose,"—his voice had changed into a decisive affirmation,—"they are a good sort, very gentle, very well worth your meeting them with fairness. You haven't met them fairly. Now, have you?"