At this, Mrs. Hazlitt, who, strictly against the rules of the school, had been sitting on Lita's bed, sprang up, and the girl at once began to smooth the bed. She was always destroying evidence of Mrs. Hazlitt's illegal conduct after one of her visits.
"Lita," exclaimed her mother, quite unconscious of any reproof in her daughter's action, "he's going to be married again! Oh! I suppose I should not have said that, but what else could he want to discuss? I do hope he is."
"Oh, I hope not!" said Lita, astonished to find how disagreeable the idea was to her.
"But don't you see how it would get him out of our way? He could hardly expect you to see much of a new bride, particularly the kind— Women pursue him so; they think that manner of his covers such a lot; they learn different.... No, Lita, not that hat—like Tweedle-dee in the saucepan. If you come down to me next Sunday I'll get you one that matches the foulard."
Suddenly they began to talk about clothes, and spoke of nothing else until it was time for Lita to go.
She thought as she ran across the green that she of all people ought to understand why her parents couldn't get on. Sometimes her mother made her feel as if she were clinging to a slippery hillside while an avalanche passed over her; and sometimes her father made her feel as if she were trying to roll a gigantic stone up that same hill. But then, on the other hand, sometimes her mother made her feel gay and stimulated, and her father gave her calm and serenity. And, after all, she hadn't chosen them; and they had chosen each other.
Her father was already waiting for her in his little car, a runabout body on a powerful foreign chassis. Everything that Mr. Hazlitt had was good of its kind and well kept up. He was sitting in the driver's seat, reading the sporting sheet of a morning paper, his knees crossed and one elbow over the back of the seat. He looked young and smart. Other cars were waiting—closed cars full of heavy bald parents. Lita felt a glow of pride. To go out with her father was like going out with a dangerous young man. Fortunately the diversity of tastes between her parents extended to their places of lodging. Her mother always stayed at an old-fashioned inn near the school grounds, whereas her father, who motored the forty miles from New York, and so never spent the night, preferred to eat at the hotel in the nearest town.
She got in beside him and they drove for some time in silence. Then he said, and she saw he had been thinking it over for some time:
"Lita, I want to speak to you about interrupting. It's a habit a great many women allow themselves to form. It's not only rude, but it's extremely irritating—alienating, indeed." He went on to assert that such a habit might even wreck her married life. A man, he said, who was interrupted every time he opened his mouth might get so that he never spoke at all; never told his wife things she ought to know.
Lita glanced at him sympathetically. Did the poor dear suppose she did not know just what he meant? She had suffered herself. Her mother often accused her of concealing things which she had tried repeatedly to tell; only her mother, with her mind running like a hound on some other idea, did not even hear. And yet on the other hand she had felt sympathetic when, not long before, her mother had delivered a short lecture on the treachery of silence; she had said—and quite truly—that a silence could be just as much of a lie as a spoken word. She wondered if she were a weak nature, agreeing with everyone who spoke to her.