Nina, too much vexed at the moment to think of any repartee to this shaft, and considerably wrought upon by conflicting emotions, saw nothing for it but to burst into tears.
“Morris, darling!” she sobbed. “I can’t bear to welcome you like this. You know I’m glad to see you, my precious, precious boy. Haven’t I been longing and praying for your return day and night?—but why couldn’t you let me know? What is to become of you if you are always to act on impulse like this, never considering anyone or anything but yourself?”
The advantage now distinctly lay with Nina, who thus skilfully shifted the responsibility for her obvious discomposure into anxiety for her son’s moral welfare.
She rapidly blinked away the drops on her long eyelashes and regained her self-command, as a glance at Morris’s lowering face informed her that the shot had told.
“Well, darling, as you have come, there’s nothing for it but to see what is convenient to these poor nuns. I don’t suppose for a moment they can take you in—it’s probably against all rules: and I don’t know what you would do here.”
“Good heavens, no!” ejaculated Morris. “I thought you’d like me to run you back in the little car, mother. You haven’t seen her yet—she’s a beauty.”
“I don’t know whether I ought to leave Frances, but”—Nina pressed her hand to her brow for a moment—“if you want me to come home, darling, I would leave it all in a moment, though as a matter of fact the Retreat is hardly begun.”
“The Retreat!” ejaculated her son in tones of contempt. “No wonder you were so bored, mother.”
“Yes, dear,” coldly said Nina, considerably exasperated by these continual references to the plaints which now served merely to discount any lustre of sacrifice which might have surrounded her departure from the convent. “You see the Retreat had not begun when I wrote, and naturally the sort of society here is not likely to prove particularly congenial to me. But I have to think about you now, and what is best.”
Morris contrived to insert a sound of amused incredulity into the low whistle with which he received this announcement of parental solicitude. Nina, with an air of being too deeply absorbed in her considerations to spare attention elsewhere, gazed thoughtfully and with compressed lips at the small, empty fireplace in front of her, and Morris strolled to the window with a markedly insouciant demeanour.