People were apt to smile at the mention of the famous little white room: those unkindly disposed called it the most finished cynicism, while even her friends were inclined to think it an affectation, though they would have been puzzled to be obliged to mention any other instance of pose in her works and days. But, as a matter of fact, both friends and foes were wrong in their judgments; the room was the sincerest possible translation of something that she truly and intimately felt. Those who knew her superficially, and, even more, those who knew her with a certain thoroughness, would have beggared the rainbow of its hues before they hit on white as the colour that matched her, and there was only one person in the world, and that Robin, to whom this white room seemed the real setting for his mother.
Naturally enough, the boy was utterly ignorant concerning the sum of what the world gabbled or whispered about her, and had he been told it, or any portion of it, he would have believed not a single syllable. But on the other hand he had that instinctive knowledge, not of what she did but of what she actually was, which no man but a son can have, and that only when it concerns just one woman in the world. For if the love of a boy for a girl is the blindest of passions, that of a son for a mother, when it has any real existence at all, is the most clear-sighted, piercing through mind and husk unimpeded, like some magical ray, and recording only the bone, the structure itself, on which the skin and tissues are hung.
Robin alone, then, in his right of entry into a certain secret place in his mother’s heart, was alone also in his right of entry into this room without inquiry, and presently he came whistling in.
“Morning, mother,” he said. “When are you and I going on the river? Oh, I say, I was sorry for you last night, being left with that fellow. Or do you like him?”
“Mr. Kuhlmann? Yes, don’t you?”
Robin picked up a cigarette.
“Well, speaking quite candidly, isn’t he rather a bounder?”
She laughed. Nobody but Robin could possibly have said that to her: there was the unique refreshment of it.
“I rather think he is,” she said. “But, then, you and I settled long ago, darling, that I liked bounders.”
“I know. Frightfully catholic of you. Sings, doesn’t he?”