“There are my father and mother!” she cried in a suffocating voice. And we three Lorings were watching her hurry across the yard and through the gap in the fence between the two places. My sister came forward. We kissed each other as awkwardly as two strangers. I looked at her dazedly. Mary, our cook, was an imposing looking lady beside this thin-haired, coarse-featured old maid. In embarrassed silence we four entered the house. I am not tall nor in the least fat, yet I had an uncontrollable impulse to stoop and to squeeze as I entered the squat and narrow doorway. That miserable little “parlor!”
As we sat silent my roving glance at last sought my mother’s face. Oh, the faces, the masks, with which freakish and so often savagely ironic fate covers and hides our souls, making fair seem foul and foul seem fair, making beauty repellent and ugliness seem beautiful. Suddenly through that plain, time- and toil-scarred mask, through those dim, sunken eyes, I saw her soul—her mother’s heart—looking at me. And the tears poured into my eyes. “Mother!” I sobbed in a choking voice, and I put my arms round her and nestled against her heart, a boy again—a bad boy with a streak of good in him. I felt how proud she—they all—were of me, the son and brother, who had gone forth and fulfilled the universal American dream of getting up in the world. I hoped, I prayed that they would not realize what a poor creature I was, with my snobbish shame.
There was an awkward, rambling attempt at talk. But we had nothing to talk about—nothing in common. I happened to think of our not having brought Margot; how shameful it was, yet how glad I felt, and how self-contemptuous for being glad. To break that awful silence I enlarged upon Margot—her beauty, her cleverness.
“She must be like Polly”—my sister’s name was Polly—“like Polly was at her age,” observed my mother.
I looked at Polly Ann, in whose faded face and withered form—faded and withered though she was not yet forty, was in fact but seven or eight years older than I. Like Polly! I could speak no more of Margot, the delicate loveliness of a rare, carefully reared hot-house exotic. Yes, exotic; for the girls and the women brought up in the super-refinements of prosperous class silliness seem foreign to this world—and are.
A few minutes that seemed hours, and Edna came in, her father and mother limping and hobbling in her train. Edna was sickly pale and her eyelids refused to rise. I shook hands with old Willie Wheatlands, hesitated, then kissed the fat, sallow, swinging cheek of my mother-in-law. Said Edna in a hard, forced voice:
“I’ve explained that Margot isn’t well and that we’ve got to get back——”
“Mercy me!” cried my mother. “Ain’t you going to stay to supper?”
Supper! It was only half-past twelve. Supper could not be until five or half-past. We had been there half an hour and already conversation was exhausted and time had become motionless.
“We intended to,” said Edna. “But Margot wasn’t at all well when we left. We simply can’t stay away long. We’d not have come, but we felt we’d never get here if we kept on letting things interfere.”