Mrs. Richmond opened her drowsy eyes. “You’ve told your father?”
Beatrice nodded. “And he promptly blew up.”
“I was sure he would.”
Beatrice’s expression—strange, satirical, sad, bitterly sad—could not but have impressed her mother had she not been more than half asleep. “You knew him better than I did,” said the girl. “Still—no matter.”
“We’ll talk about it after I’ve had my nap.”
“Oh, there’s nothing to talk about.”
“That’s true,” said her mother comfortably, as she slid luxuriously down the descent into unconsciousness—or is it an ascent? “You know there’s nothing to do but to obey your father. And he’s right. You’ll be better satisfied with Peter.” And Mrs. Richmond was asleep.
Beatrice stood looking at her mother. Her expression of somewhat undaughterly pity vanished and there was a rush of tears to her eyes, an uncontrollable tremor of the fresh, young lips usually curved in response to emotions in which tenderness had little part. “Dear mother,” she murmured. She understood her mother’s lot now, and sympathized in a way which Daniel Richmond’s wife, unconscious what havoc those years of gradually deepened slavery had wrought in her mind, her heart, her whole life, would have regarded as hysterical and silly. Love had lifted Beatrice above the narrow environment in which she had been bred and had quickened her to a sense of values she could hardly have got otherwise. She saw her mother as she was, as her mother could no more have seen herself than the lifelong drunkard, happy in his squalid sottishness, could reconstruct and regret the innocence from which he has dropped into the depths by a gradient so easy that it was unnoted. The girl realized that her mother’s chief substantial happiness was inability to comprehend her own fate. “Thank God,” said she to herself, “I had my eyes opened in time.” And one by one before her passed faces of fashionable matrons, young and old, whom she knew well—hard or hardening features, like landscapes upon which only bleak winds blow and only meager light from cold, gray skies falls; eyes from which looked shriveled souls, souls in which all human sympathy, save the condescending charity that is vanity rather than sympathy, had dried up; lives filled with shams and pretenses; trim and showy gardens in which no flower had perfume, no fruit had taste, and where shone not one of the free, beautiful blossoms of genuine love. Not hard hearts really, but shriveled; not unhappy lives, but stunted and sunless, like plants grown in the luxury of a rich loam—in a dark cellar. The shock of disillusionment as to her father completed for Beatrice the transformation that had been started by the undermining effect of Roger upon her conventional ideas—as a thunderbolt crashes down a weakened dam and releases its floods.
Beatrice passed a light and caressing hand over her mother’s beautifully arranged hair, bent and kissed her. Then she stole from the room—with a lingering glance of tenderest sweetness back from the threshold.
An hour and a quarter ticked away in that splendid room, with its wall coverings and upholsteries of dark-red brocaded silk. In stepped Richmond, brisk and bristling. He frowned at his sleeping wife, tapping his foot impatiently upon the floor. “Lucy!” he called sharply.