How would her mother explain these things? Would she, indeed, explain to her daughter at all? In any case, Louise formed the resolve not to question her mother. She possessed, what is unusual in woman, an instinctive appreciation of the rights of others, even when such rights are perversely altered to wrongs. She considered that her mother's affairs were her own, in so far as they did not involve herself, Louise Treharne, in any tacit copartnership; and as to this point she purposed ascertaining, before very long, to just what extent she had become or was expected to become involved. For the rest, she was conscious of a distinct sympathy for and a yearning toward her mother. In her reflections she gave her mother the benefit of every mitigating circumstance.
Turning from the window, Louise saw her mother standing before the dresser glass studying her haggard morning face, now lacking all of the sorely-required aids to the merely pretty regularity of her features, with a head-shaking lugubriousness that might have had its comic appeal to an unconcerned onlooker. Louise, however, was scarcely in a mood of mirth.
"I knocked, my dear, but you were too much absorbed," said Mrs. Treharne, offering her daughter her cheek. "You were in a veritable trance. Did you get enough sleep, child? Was Heloise in a scolding humor? She makes my life a misery to me with her tongue. What beautiful hair you have! And what a perfect skin! A powder puff would mar that wonderful pallor. Yet you are not too white. It becomes you, with your hair. Appreciate these things while you have them, dear; look at your mother, a hag, a witch, at thirty-nine! But, then, you will keep your looks longer than I; you pattern after the women of your——"
She came perilously close to saying "your father's family," but adroitly turned the phrase when she caught herself in time. Louise, putting on a cheerful mask, replied to her mother's trivialities and devised some of her own. Her mother had not lost her banting-killed bloom when Louise had last seen her at such an hour in the morning; and the girl was inwardly pained to note how all but the mere vestiges of her remembered prettiness had disappeared. Mrs. Treharne caught her looking at her with a certain scrutinizing reflectiveness, and she broke out petulantly:
"Don't pick me apart with your eyes in that way, Louise! I know that I am hideous, but for heaven's sake don't remind me of it with your criticizing, transfixing gazes!"
She was of the increasing type of women who, long after they have the natural right to expect adulation on account of their looks, still hate to surrender. Louise quickly perceived this and provided unguents for her mother's sensitiveness.
They chatted upon little matters, Mrs. Treharne so ill at ease (yet striving to hide her restlessness) that she found it impossible to sit still for more than a minute; she fluttered incessantly about the room, her wonderful negligée of embroidered turquoise sailing after her like the outspread wings of a moth. After many pantheress-like rounds of the room, during which Louise somehow felt her old diffidence in her mother's presence returning upon her, Mrs. Treharne, after her evident casting about for an opening, stopped before Louise and pinched her cheek between dry fingers.
"At any rate, my dear," she said with a trace of her old amiability and animation, "you are not a frump or a bluestocking! There was a time when I had two fears: that you would not grow up pretty and that you would become bookish. And here I find myself towered over by a young princess, and you don't talk in the least like a girl with crazy notions of keeping up her inane school studies." Then, after a slight pause: "Are you religious, my dear, or—er—well, broad-minded?"
Louise smothered her mounting laugh, for fear of offending her mother in her mood of amiability; but her smile was eloquent enough.
"Is there any incompatibility between those two states of mind, mother?" she asked.