Louise's life at the house on the Drive quickly resolved itself into a daily programme tinctured with a monotony that could not but wear upon the spirits of a young woman of a naturally cheerful and gregarious temperament.
Her mother, generally in a state of feverish unrest that marked her strained incertitude over a situation which, in a way, was more intolerable to her than to her daughter because she was guiltily conscious that she was the maker of it, usually dropped into Louise's room for an hour's chat during the forenoon. She was alternately affectionate, stilted, indifferent and petulant in her attitude toward her daughter. She did not seek, in her brooding self-communings, to thrust aside the keen consciousness that she was utterly and hopelessly in the wrong; but this consciousness did not serve to allay her irritation, even if it was directed against herself. Like most women, she hated to be in the wrong; and she particularly loathed the thought of confessing herself in the wrong. She was less immoral than unmoral; her descent had been due to a sort of warped view as to forbidden relationships, nourished by an inborn and intense dislike for the sovereignty of convention—"the tyranny of the smug," she habitually called it—and based essentially upon her love of luxurious and extravagant living. But a consciousness of these facts only made her self-contempt the more keen. She measured and despised her sordidness. She was not, she fell into the habit of reflecting after her daughter's return, the victim of anybody but herself; her days of ardor had slipped away; she well knew that she had not even the excuse of a fondness for the man who had made her a social pariah. If she had ever experienced any such a fondness that fact might have mitigated, at least in her own self-view, the rawness of her course. But she cared nothing for Judd, which made her case abominable, and she knew it.
Yet her weakened will, her character rendered flaccid by years of careless self-indulgence, made it acutely difficult for her to contemplate the thought of abandoning her way of living, even for the sake of her daughter. Her prettiness was now purely a matter of meretricious building up; she would soon be forty; she fumed inwardly at the thought of middle age, which now, for her, was only around the corner, so to speak; she had been cast off by her own kind; and the terminal idea of her self-communings always was that, since there was no hope for her in any event, no matter what she might do, she might as well finish the scroll. She pushed aside Louise's involvement in the difficulty as something that would—that would have to—adjust itself. A way out for Louise must present itself sooner or later; but the way out for her daughter must be one that would not demand too great a sacrifice—if any sacrifice at all—on her own part. Perhaps a good marriage could be contrived for Louise; that would be the easiest and most natural solution; and she would cast about in her mind for eligibles on whose sensitive social concepts perhaps her own method of life would not grate. Her dreary meditations usually terminated with futilities of this sort.
Louise, fighting back the oppressiveness that had clutched her ever since her return from school, was cheerful and sunny when her mother was with her. She made no allusion of any sort to the conditions of her environment. Her mother, noticing this, was grateful for it, and she was conscious of a genuine and growing admiration for the mingled dignity and delicacy of her daughter's behavior. On one of her forenoon visits to Louise's dressing room the mother herself, swept by a feeling of remorse in the contemplation of the girl's fragrant, pure-eyed beauty, could not refrain from touching impulsively upon the nub of her own unrest.
"My dear," she said to Louise, passing a white and still prettily rounded arm around her daughter, "do you hate your little mother?"
Louise fought back the tears that suffused her eyes.
"Why do you ask such a thing, dear?" she asked in a voice the hoarseness of which she strove to disguise.
Her mother did not reply to the question, but went on, turning her head away:
"Because there are circumstances, conditions that you can't have failed to notice here that maybe—" She struggled for words. "It has never been in my heart to do anything except what was right and fair by you, child, but one drifts, drifts, always drifts——"