“No, no, it isn’t that,” Elinor hastened to interrupt. She felt apologetic, too. “My mother’s ideas are rather peculiar. She’s a dear, but she is old-fashioned and——”
“I wonder,” he said slowly, placing his hand over hers as if quite by accident and allowing it to remain there, “if we couldn’t manage to meet in spite of—mother’s precaution. I have a perfect little speed marvel of a roadster. Can’t I take you for a drive?—Say Tuesday afternoon?”
Elinor’s heart thumped madly, and struggle as she would, she could not control the trembling of her hands beneath his. But she replied with seeming carelessness, after what might have been due deliberation. “Well—er—possibly. I know I should enjoy it immensely—still——”
Templeton Druid half suppressed a sigh as of deep joy and delight.
“Then that’s settled,” he breathed, “and I’ll be at the 57th Street entrance to the park at two o’clock—Ah, kind—so kind!”
And his eyes, as Geraldine DeLacy caught a quick glimpse of them from across the table and smiled, said unutterable things as he gazed into the misty blue orbs of Elinor Benton.
CHAPTER VII
Elinor Benton’s worldly intuition that a crisis was imminent in her home, an inevitable clash with her mother in which one or the other would have to admit herself vanquished was not without foundation. Neither the girl nor her father were able to comprehend the mother’s attitude nor why she should herself be, or wish them to be so different from all those with whom they were in these days thrown in contact. Sixteen years of suppressing her emotions, of unsatisfied longings had made her incapable of showing her inner feelings, the tenderness that so passionately wished only for the good of those dear to her. From some remote ancestor she must have inherited the coldness and intolerance she showed outwardly, and which was to her husband and children their only criterion. Cold and hard outwardly, intolerant to the extreme of anything that did not agree with her puritanical convictions which the years of self-communing had made all but fanatical, Marjorie Benton did not, could not open her heart and plead with those she loved to understand her, to meet her half-way in her efforts to make them see all she wished was to stand for what was good, pure and true. A faulty reasoning, aided by that inherited stubbornness, had persuaded her her best source was to assert indomitable authority as wife and mother—to force her own to bend to her will, with no idea of the give and take that makes worlds go around smoothly. She had forgot to reason, too, that her children were her own, and had without doubt inherited some of that very stubbornness which so momentarily threatened the Benton ship with going on the rocks.
Elinor had felt—seen—the clash coming. But she had not expected it quite so soon after her confidential chat with her father.
The lateness of the hour—(it was past seven) when she arrived home from her afternoon at the matinée was the signal—the beginning of it all. Her father and mother had finished their dinner and were in the library, the father absorbed in his evening paper, but the mother sat with her hands idly clasped in her lap, her eyes never wandering from the clock in the corner until her daughter rushed in apologetically.