“Madame Vicaud appeared in the midst of the commotion, and quenched in a moment the ugly flicker of vulgarity. The Barnetts guessed that there must have been a terrible scene between the two, but Madame Vicaud carried off her daughter, completely quelled, it seemed. She could not save the situation; she merely made it tragic instead of odious. That is the story,” said Lady Surfex, after a pause in which Damier, with a whitened face, kept a sick silence—“only the story, after all, of a vulgar girl who makes her mother piteous.
“I should love to meet Madame Vicaud. She does not know that I know, nor, I think, does the girl. The best thing, I fancy, would be if the girl could be married off to somebody who understood—and didn’t mind. Don’t you think so? Could we try to help Madame Vicaud like that?”
Damier could not think just now of Claire’s future; he was thinking, persistently, of Madame Vicaud—seeing her as a white flower sunken up to the brave and fragile petals in mud. The past clung to her in her daughter—greedy, husband-hunting, lax, and vulgar. What must the tortured mother’s heart have felt at this heaping of shame upon her proudest head? How, more and more, he understood, and interpreted, her silences, her reserves!
In a dry voice he said that he could hardly hope for any possible atonement to Madame Vicaud.
“Have I been wrong in telling you—ungenerous?” asked Lady Surfex.
“No; right. It makes one more able to help her; or, at least, to feel where she most needs help. It is only in lifting the daughter that one can help her.”
“We will lift her!” said Lady Surfex, with a glance at his absorbed face. “And then, if we do,—right out of the mother’s life,—what will she do alone?”
“She would never allow her to be lifted out of her life.”
“Well, only in the literal sense of going away to live with her husband.”
“Her husband! It seems a difficult thing to find her one!”