“It would be impossible to let him go without me.”
“Really, Mathilde!” said Mrs. Farron, gently, as if she, so willing to play fair, were being put off with fantasies. “I don’t understand you,” she added.
“No, Mama; you don’t.”
The motor stopped at the door, and they went in silence to Mrs. Farron’s room, where for a bitter hour they talked, neither yielding an inch. At last Adelaide sent the girl to bed. Mathilde was aware of profound physical exhaustion, and yet underneath there was a high knowledge of something unbreakable within her.
Left alone, Adelaide turned instinctively toward her husband’s door. There were her strength and vision. Then she remembered, and drew back; but presently, hearing a stir there, she knocked very softly. A nurse appeared on the instant.
“Oh, please, Mrs. Farron! Mr. Farron has just got to sleep.”
Adelaide stood alone in the middle of the floor. Once again, she thought, in a crisis of her life she had no one to depend on but herself. She lifted her shoulders. No one was to blame, but there the fact was. They urged you to cling and be guided, but when the pinch came, you had to act for yourself. She had learned her lesson now. Henceforward she took her own life over into her own hands.
She reviewed her past dependences. Her youth, with its dependence on her father, particularly in matters of dress. She recalled her early photographs with a shudder. Had she really dressed so badly or was it only the change of fashion? And then her dependence on Joe Severance. What could be more ridiculous than for a woman of her intelligence to allow herself to be guided in everything by a man like Joe, who had nothing himself but a certain shrewd masculinity? And now Vincent. She was still under the spell of his superiority, but perhaps she would come to judge him too. She had learned much from him. Perhaps she had learned all he had to teach her. Her face looked as if it were carved out of some smooth white stone.
CHAPTER X
After she had gone up-stairs, Mathilde went down again to telephone Pete that she had made her decision. She went boldly snapping electric switches, for her going was a sort of assertion of her right to independent action. She would have hesitated even less if she had known how welcome her news was, how he had suffered since their parting.