“It is the same with the building and furnishing of a house,” Helen showed up again. “They hire an architect and a decorator. And then they hire a landscape gardener. And when the whole scene inside and out is laid, they live in it as if they had planned it and achieved it. But they have bought every line, every shadow, and all the perspective—things that you feel and see, but cannot touch. It is not the house, but the idea it suggests for which you pay most. I had my own ideas, but I employed professionals to produce them. This is what I have learned,” she concluded, “not to cobble my own ideas. I simply told those men what I wanted.”
“I should have liked to hear your instructions,” he said.
“They were short. I told the architect that I wanted an honorable looking house, not a grand one.”
He nodded, appreciatively, and waited. Some subtle change had taken place in her mind toward him during this last moment. There was a compelling power in her expression, as if now she wished to hold his attention. She had a purpose. He became uneasy and curious.
“And I told the man who was to choose the furniture and do the inside decorations that I wanted a home, a mild kind of place with some sadness in it, like the heart of a mother; and rifts of brightness in it, like the face of a mother when she smiles; and everything very fine to honor her, the mother, you understand, in the eyes of her children.”
Shippen’s agreeable attention changed for one instant to a blank stare; then he dropped his eyes as she went on with this intimate account of what she wanted her home to be. Mother! And she had no children. The term had for him a sort of embarrassing animal significance. It was not discussed this way in polite circles, even by women who were mothers. You were supposed not to know it or to forget that this sparkling being with whom you were conversing, or maybe flirting, had passed through the experiences of an accouchement. His feelings suffered a revulsion toward her. But she held him as if she meant that he should carry away with him the dimensions, the waist measure, the countenance and the germinating biography of this house.
“I told him,” she went on, still referring to the decorator, “that I wanted a home inside, where children would look as if they belonged in it, and not as if they had escaped from their own hidden quarters—soft places in it, you know, where a baby could just fall asleep, like the sofa over there,” indicating with a nod a wide, low, old-fashioned soda shrouded in shadows.
He cast an embarrassed glance at it. His feelings were that a babe should be kept concealed until it was a child of an age to be decently exposed and confessed. Some men are like that, and a few women. Their parent instincts have decayed.
“And when they become grown sons and daughters,” she continued, taking no notice of his discomfiture, “there should be wide, happy spaces in here for their joys—a house for lovers and weddings.”
He waited. Apparently she had finished. He raised his eyes and saw her flushed, animated. “But why should you want such a house?” he asked, not that it made any difference now what she wanted. So far as he was concerned the spell of her charm was broken. His one desire was to escape this disenchantment and to find out what was in the wind for Cutter. He clung to that joke.