Until custom dulled the edge of that pain, the days and the nights were the cruelest in her apprenticeship up to that time.
When her boy, Gardiner, was five years old, she got her father and mother to keep him at Saint X with them.
"New York's no place, I think, to bring up and educate a boy in the right way," she explained. And it was the truth, though not the whole truth. The concealed part was that she would have made an open break with her husband had there been no other way of safeguarding their all-seeing, all-noting boy from his example.
Before Gardiner went to live with his grandparents she stayed in the East, making six or eight brief visits "home" each year. When he went she resolved to divide her year between her pleasure as a mother and her obligation to her son's father, to her parents' son-in-law—her devotions at the shrine of Appearances.
It was in the fall of the year she was twenty-five—eight years and a half after she left Battle Field—that Hampden Scarborough reappeared upon the surface of her life.
On a September afternoon in that year Olivia, descending from the train at Saint X, was almost as much embarrassed as pleased by her changed young cousin rushing at her with great energy—"Dear, dear Olivia! And hardly any different—how's the baby? No—not Fred, but Fred Junior, I mean. In some ways you positively look younger. You know, you were SO serious at college!"
"But you—I don't quite understand how any one can be so changed, yet—recognizable. I guess it's the plumage. You're in a new edition—an edition deluxe."
Pauline's dressmakers were bringing out the full value of her height and slender, graceful strength. Her eyes, full of the same old frankness and courage, now had experience in them, too. She was wearing her hair so that it fell from her brow in two sweeping curves reflecting the light in sparkles and flashes. Her manner was still simple and genuine—the simplicity and genuineness of knowledge now, not of innocence. Extremes meet—but they remain extremes. Her "plumage" was a fashionable dress of pale blue cloth, a big beplumed hat to match, a chiffon parasol like an azure cloud, at her throat a sapphire pendant, about her neck and swinging far below her waist a chain of sapphires.
"And the plumage just suits her," thought Olivia. For it seemed to her that her cousin had more than ever the quality she most admired—the quality of individuality, of distinction. Even in her way of looking clean and fresh she was different, as if those prime feminine essentials were in her not matters of frequent reacquirement but inherent and inalienable, like her brilliance of eyes and smoothness of skin.
Olivia felt a slight tugging at the bag she was carrying. She looked—an English groom in spotless summer livery was touching his hat in respectful appeal to her to let go. "Give Albert your checks, too," said Pauline, putting her arm around her cousin's waist to escort her down the platform. At the entrance, with a group of station loungers gaping at it, was a phaeton-victoria lined with some cream-colored stuff like silk, the horses and liveried coachman rigid. "She's giving Saint X a good deal to talk about," thought Olivia.