By mid-January Louise had completed her inventory of the situation. She faced her position without flinching and with no visible sign of the distress the gradually unfolding picture caused her, save a certain silent preoccupation from which Laura vainly sought to rouse her by taking her on incessant rounds of the theatres, whisking her off on short up-State and Long Island motor tours, and providing other means of distraction and excitement. Laura's heart ached for Louise. Her own girlhood had been clouded by trouble. Orphaned at sixteen, an heiress with no disinterested advisors save those who were the legal guardians of her person and estate, she had yielded shortly after leaving school to a girlish infatuation and entered upon a surreptitious marriage with a man who, with his child-wife's large wealth at his disposal, had surrendered to one dissipation after another until, eventually becoming a drug fiend, he had, in his treatment of her, developed into such an utterly savage and irresponsible brute that she was compelled to divorce him, after which he had been put under permanent restraint. It had taken Laura long years to recover her natural equipoise after her bitter disillusionment. Louise's trouble, Laura could not help apprehending, was even more grievous than her own had been, intensified as she knew it must be by the girl's carefully-screened feeling of humiliation.
Laura admired Louise beyond words for her uncomplaining acceptance of her bitter bolus.
"I never saw such pluck," she told John Blythe time and again. "It is the pluck of a thoroughbred. I believe she thoroughly understands everything now, except that she is in Judd's debt for her education. Her loyalty to her mother is wonderful, beautiful; far greater than Antoinette really deserves. I don't remember ever meeting a girl or woman whom I admired so much as I do Louise Treharne."
Laura could not fail to note how Blythe's clear grey eyes would glisten when thus she praised the girl.
"Louise is like her father," he would say in reply to Laura's enthusiasm. "You know what a fine, game man George Treharne was and is. I'll never forget how generous he was in his treatment of me—and he tried to prevent me from knowing it, too—when, as a cub lawyer, I was first starting out on my own hook; and there wasn't the least reason in life why he should have been so decent to me, either. You remember how he never whimpered when Antoinette dragged his—Oh, well, no use in referring to that. But, when I first met the grown-up Louise on the train—after I accidentally discovered her identity, I mean—I couldn't help but observe how her resemblance to her father—"
"To whom," Laura watched him with twinkling eyes, "your sense of responsibility is so great that—er—that—"
Whereupon Blythe would flush hotly and proceed to shrivel Laura with whatever in the way of polite invective occurred to him in his confusion.
The thought of leaving her mother for the sake of extricating herself from a difficult and taxing situation never entered Louise's mind. Her mother, she felt, needed her. It was not, she considered, a problem for her interposition; she shrank from the thought of even mentioning it. She knew that it was an utterly impossible situation; she had a profound belief that it was not, from its very nature, destined to last; but she preferred that her mother should take the initiative in casting off the evil. She clearly saw how, from day to day, her mother was becoming increasingly conscious of the grave trouble she was heaping upon her daughter's young shoulders; she perceived how her mother, not inherently vicious, simply was in the bondage of an ingrained, luxury-loving selfishness, and that, having been cast out of the social realm in which she formerly had moved, she was now possessed by a sort of despair which, more than anything else, prevented her from making the attempt to extricate herself from the slough.
Louise, then, schooled herself to wait. It was a sort of waiting that drew heavily upon her natural store of equanimity. But she could see no other course, and hopefulness is the tandem mate of youth.
"I have lived long enough," Laura said to her one afternoon, when they were driving, during this trying period when Louise was testing her adaptability to the utmost, "to have discovered that nothing matters very much except one's own peace of mind. If one have that, the rest is all a mirage. I don't mean the peace of mind that proceeds from a priggish sense of superiority to human weaknesses. That, I am pleased to say, is a sort of mental peace that I haven't yet experienced, and I hope I never shall. But when one's hands are just decently clean, and one at least has tried to shake off the shackles forged by one's own little meannesses, a sort of satisfying mental quiet ensues that is worth, I think, more than anything else one finds in life."