"I wonder where mother is," Lester asked himself, and immediately was in her room upstairs.
She was seated before a mirror, trying on a hat. Another hat was on a chair beside her. Two bandboxes with a disarray of silver paper stood beside her on the floor. Ethelind, short-skirted, and moving with nimble, sylphlike feet, was standing back to get the effect.
"I think I like that one the better of the two," she was saying, "and yet I don't know but—"
"Oh, they're awful, both of them," the mother complained. "It's funny I can never get a hat that suits me but the same old thing."
Lester went forward. He meant that she should see him first in the mirror. The reflection would startle her, of course, but he should be able to reassure her.
It was he who was startled first, since, standing before the mirror, he didn't get his own reflection. He felt so solid, so warm, so full of energy, that it seemed to him impossible that a reflection should not be cast. But there was nothing—nothing but the image of his mother casting her bright eyes up at the cockatoo crest on a hat that suggested a Mephistopheles.
"Mother, I want to talk to you about Molly."
"Oh, dear, what an old hag I'm beginning to look!"
"Oh no, you're not, mother dear," Ethelind returned, cheerfully. "That's just worry. One of these days the war will be over and he'll be coming back a great general—"
"What's the use of the war being over and his coming back a great general, when that creature will have the first say in him?"