Neither of them saw Marjorie Benton as she came slowly down the wide flower-banked stairway and drooped across the hall to the door leading to her ballroom. With one hand holding aside the blossom curtain, she stopped and gazed wide-eyed at what she saw, as though she could hardly believe what the glittering chandelier lights revealed. It was a picture that some might have called appealing and beautiful—that fairy-like girl of eighteen with her neck and arms of marble whiteness and smoothness nestling in her handsome father’s arms. To Marjorie Benton, however, the beauty of the picture was lost. It was something else she saw that brought a stern light into eyes faded by years of unrequited yearning, and hardened the features with which time had not dealt so lightly as it had with her husband. As she stood there for the moment unseen, ready for her daughter’s debut, Marjorie Benton could not by any stretch of the imagination have been placed in the picture class herself. Sixteen years of loneliness and weary waiting had wrought havoc with her delicate beauty, and where now, at forty, she should have been at the full blush of womanly beauty, she might have been a woman of sixty-five. Golden her hair was still—but it had lost its sheen and taken on instead the dull luster of carelessly-kept gold and silver. There was as much silver as gold at forty, too. The corners of her mouth drooped pathetically—all the starlight had long since departed from her eyes that bore an expression merely of weariness. Now, too, her gown of amethyst velvet with lace of the same shade, cut in severely plain lines, would have been most appropriate for a woman of sixty-five.
Hugh and Elinor turned with a start, the girl to take on an expression of defiance as the mother’s voice came low, tense, compelling, from the doorway: “Elinor! Your dress!”
“Well,” was the pert retort. “Don’t you like it? Dad does. Don’t you, dad?”
But Marjorie was not to be placated.
“I suppose I’m not to believe this is your fault, my daughter,” added the mother as though unaware of the interruption. “I take it that Madame Felice has ignored my orders. To-morrow I shall ’phone her and withdraw my patronage from her establishment.”
Hugh had made no move or word as he calmly looked his wife over. But there was now distaste in the closing of his eyes as though to shut out the vision in the doorway, and veil the disappointment he feared he could not hide.
Gaining confidence in her father’s presence, Elinor Benton answered her mother calmly, but with little show of due respect.
“Now, mother,” she implored, “don’t get so excited—this isn’t a tragedy, and don’t you go and ’phone Felice—because it wasn’t her fault. I called her up and told her to leave the dress as it was.”
“Of course, you’re aware she had no right to take orders from you contrary to mine,” Marjorie persisted, with lifted eyebrows.
“Oh, I just told her the orders came from you—that you had changed your mind.”