“Are you ill?”
“No.”
“Has anything happened?”
“Not a thing.”
“I don’t know. Oh, mother, I just want to be left alone”—followed by another paroxysm of weeping.
Mrs. Adams waited grimly until the distressing convulsions of the slender young body subsided. Then she began again: “Well, you can’t be left in this fix. Turn over, Helen. You are mussing your dress.”
The girl turned obediently, her face poignantly, sweetly pink, very sad. Her eyes bright with tears like violets after a summer rain. The flush was ominous. Mrs. Adams had never seen Helen this color before, never in her life. She bent and laid a palm on the girl’s brow—warm, but moist; certainly not feverish.
She stood regarding her daughter thoughtfully. Then she sat down on the side of the bed, took one of Helen’s hands in her own harsher, stronger hand, where it lay like a plucked lily, wilted, icy cold. She stroked it gently. Her face softened, her eyes brooded, as if through a mist she beheld a memory of herself long ago, which suddenly freshened and brightened into the figure of the girl she had been.
Mothers are omniscient. They have little paths back and forth through their years by which the ghosts of them can always find you, wherever you are. Not another word was spoken for a long time between these two; the younger, overcome by the future, holding the unsolved, longed-for mystery of love; the other, overcome by the past, which held for her the dreadful reality of love. Neither had or could escape. They accomplished a wordless sympathy on this basis.