The happiest time of their lives

by Alice Duer Miller

Adelaide was surprised and not pleased when Mathilde came home late for lunch, bringing the Wayne boy with her. It was not that she had expected her one little phrase about Wayne’s hands to change her daughter’s love into repugnance,—that sentence had been only the first drop in a distillation that would do its poisonous work gradually,—but she had supposed that Mathilde would be too sensitive to expose Pete to further criticism. Indeed, there seemed something obtuse, if not actually indelicate, in being willing to create a situation in which every one was bound to suffer. Obtuseness was not a defect with which Adelaide had much patience.

Mathilde saw at once that her mother was going to be what in the family slang was called “grand.” The grandeur consisted in a polite inattention; it went with a soft voice and immobile expression. In this mood Adelaide answered you about three seconds later than you expected, and though she answered you accurately, it was as if she had forced her mind back from a more congenial ether. She seemed to be wrapped in an agreeable cloud until you gave her some opening, and then she came out of her cloud like a flash of lightning.

Wayne, who had lived his life so far with a woman who did not believe in the use of force in human relations, viewed these symptoms of coercion with the utmost indifference; but Mathilde had not so far freed herself as to ignore them. She was not afraid, but easy conversation under the menace was beyond her. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

Adelaide was accustomed by these methods to drive the inexperienced—and she considered Pete pitifully inexperienced in social fine points—into a state of conversational unrest in which they would finally ask recklessly, “Have you been to the theater lately?” and she would question gently, “The theater?” as much as to say, “I’ve heard that word somewhere before,” until the conscientious conversationalist, rushing from futility to futility, would be finally engulfed in some yawning banality and sink out of sight forever.

But Wayne resisted this temptation, or, rather, he did not feel it. He had the courage to be unafraid of silences, and he ate his luncheon and thought about the pictures he had been seeing, and at last began to talk to Mathilde about them, while Adelaide made it clear that she was not listening, until she caught a phrase that drove her grandeur away.

“Near where we met my grandfather?” Mathilde asked.

By this time Adelaide had gathered that the two had been in the museum, and the knowledge annoyed her not only as a mother, but as an aristocrat. Without being clear about it, she regarded the love of beauty—artificial beauty, that is—as a class distinction. It seemed to her possible enough that the masses should love mountains and moonlight and the sea and sunsets; but it struck her as unfitting that any one but the people she knew, and only a few of them, should really care for porcelains and pictures. As she held herself aloof from the conversation she was annoyed at noticing that Wayne was showing a more discriminating taste than her own carefully nurtured child. But all such considerations were driven away by the mention of her father, for Mr. Lanley had been in her mind ever since Mrs. Baxter had taken her unimpeded departure just before luncheon.

“Your grandfather?” she said, coming out of the clouds. “Was he in the Metropolitan?”

“Yes,” said Mathilde, thankful to be directly addressed. “Wasn’t it queer? Pete was taking me to see a picture that looks exactly like Mrs. Wayne, only Mrs. Wayne hasn’t such a round face, and there in front of it was grandpapa.”

Adelaide rose very slowly from table, lunch being fortunately over. She felt as if she could have borne almost anything but this—the idea of her father vaporing before a picture of the Madonna. Phrases came into her head: silly old man, the time has come to protect him against himself; the Wayne family must be suppressed.