"No, ma'am, I...."
"I asked for Mr. Whitelaw's room. They told me to come to number twenty-eight."
Making her way out, she kept looking back at him in terror. When he hurried to open the door for her, she waved him away. Everything she did and said was rapid, staccato, and peremptory.
"You've forgotten your gloves, ma'am."
He reached them with a stretch of his arm. Taking them from him, she still kept her eyes on his face.
"No! You don't look like him. I thought you did. I was wrong. It's only the—the eyes—and the eyebrows."
She was gone. He closed the door upon her. Dropping into an armchair by the window, he stared out on a wide low landscape, with a double procession of motor cars in the foreground, and a river in the middle distance.
So this was the woman who had lived through the agony of a stolen child! He tried to recall what Honey had told him of the tragedy. He remembered the house which five years earlier Honey had taken him to see; he remembered the dell with the benches and the lilacs. This woman's child had been wheeled out there one morning—and had vanished. She had had to bear being told of the fact. She had gone through the minutes when the mind couldn't credit it. She had known fear, frenzy, hope, suspense, disappointment, discouragement, despair, and lassitude. In self-defense, in sheer inability of the human spirit to endure more than it has endured, she had thrown round her a hard little shell of refusal to hear of it again. She resented the reminder. She was pricked to a frantic excitement by a mere chance resemblance to the image of what the lost little boy might have become.
A chance resemblance! He underscored the words. It was all there was. He himself was the son of Theodore and Lucy Whitelaw. At least he thought her name was Lucy. Not till he had been required to give the names of his parents for some school record did it occur to him that he didn't positively know. She had always been "Mudda." He hadn't needed another name. After she had gone there had been no one to supply him with the facts he had not learned before. Even the Theodore would have escaped him had it not been for that last poignant scene, when she stood before the officer and gave a name—Mrs. Theodore Whitelaw! Why not? There were more Whitelaws than one. There was no monopoly of the name in the family that had lost the child.
He didn't often consciously think of her nowadays. The memory was not merely too painful; it was too destructive of the things he was trying to cherish. He had impulses rather than ideals, in that impulses form themselves more spontaneously; and all his impulses were toward rectitude. It was not a chosen standard; neither was it imposed upon him from without, unless it was in some vague general direction of the spirit received while at the Tollivants. He didn't really think of it. He took it as a matter of course. He couldn't be anything but what he was, and there was an end of it. But all his attempts to get a working concept of himself led him back to this beginning, where the fountain of life was befouled.