The happiest time of their lives

by Alice Duer Miller

Mathilde thought it very possible, and went away to get dressed. She went into her own room and shut the door sharply behind her.

All the time she was dressing she tried to rehearse her case—that it was her life, her love, her chance; but all the time she had a sickening sense that a lifted eye-brow of her mother’s would make it sound childish and absurd even in her own ears. She had counted on a long evening, but when she went down-stairs she found three or four friends of her mother’s were to dine and go to the theater. The dinner was amusing, the talk, though avowedly hampered by the presence of Mathilde, was witty and unexpected enough; but Mathilde was not amused by it, for she particularly dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the whole first act, appeared, in the entr’acte, to feel no hesitation in condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed heartily over the playwright’s conception of social usages, and made Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was the guiltiest of secrets.

As they drove home, she was again alone with her mother, and she said at once the sentence she had determined on:

“I don’t think you understood, Mama, how seriously I meant what I said this afternoon.”

Mrs. Farron was bending her long-waisted figure forward to get a good look at a picture which, small, lonely, and brightly lighted, hung in a picture-dealer’s window. It was a picture of an empty room. Hot summer sunlight filtered through the lowered Venetian blinds, and fell in bands on the golden wood of the floor. Outside the air was burned and dusty, but inside the room all was clear, cool, and pure.

“How perfect his things are,” murmured Mrs. Farron to herself, and then added to her daughter: “Yes, my dear, I did take in what you said. You really think you are in love with this Wayne boy, don’t you? It’s immensely to your credit, darling,” she went on, her tone taking on a flattering sweetness, “to care so much about any one who has such funny, stubby little hands—most unattractive hands,” she added almost dreamily.

There was a long pause during which an extraordinary thing happened to Mathilde. She found that it didn’t make the very slightest difference to her what her mother thought of Pete or his hands, that it would never make any difference to her again. It was as if her will had suddenly been born, and the first act of that will was to decide to go with the man she loved. How could she have doubted for an instant? It was so simple, and no opposition would or could mean anything to her. She was not in the least angry; on the contrary, she felt extremely pitiful, as if she were saying good-by to some one who did not know she was going away, as if in a sense she had now parted from her mother forever. Tears came into her eyes.

“Ah, Mama!” she said like a sigh.

Mrs. Farron felt she had been cruel, but without regretting it; for that, she thought, was often a parent’s duty.

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Mathilde. The boy is a nice enough little person, but really I could not let you set off for China at a minute’s notice with any broker’s clerk who happened to fall in love with your golden hair. When you have a little more experience you will discriminate between the men you like to have love you and the men there is the smallest chance of your loving. I assure you, if little Wayne were not in love with you, you would think him a perfectly commonplace boy. If one of your friends were engaged to him, you would be the first to say that you wondered what it was she saw in him. That isn’t the way one wants people to feel about one’s husband, is it? And as to going to China with him, you know that’s impossible, don’t you?”