“My dear mother, there really can’t be two opinions about the question of a child of eighteen or nineteen being allowed to take vows which will bind her to a life of that sort. It’s simply iniquitous.”
“You talk like a child, Morris!” exclaimed his parent, pale with annoyance. “But it only makes me laugh, a little sadly, to hear you. You’ll feel so very differently in a few years’ time.”
“I doubt it,” declared Morris easily. “A friend of mine—no one whom you’d know, mother dear—has gone into that sort of thing a good deal, and is thinking of being a Trappist monk. We’ve naturally had a good deal of discussion on the subject.”
Nina gazed at her son with a freezing eye. It gave her the most acute sensation of annoyance every time that she realized afresh in him the self-opinionated arrogance which he derived from her.
“My poor boy,” she said at last, “you don’t really suppose, do you, that your discussion of any of the real things of life can count for anything? Why, your opinions have no more value, to those of us who know, than the little idle chirpings of a baby bird that thinks it knows how to fly without waiting to be taught.”
The vigor of this trenchant simile carried Nina sublimely past its ornithological inexactitude, and she recovered her poise of mind.
“Little Frances will have a very beautiful, peaceful, sheltered life,” she observed thoughtfully. “She has shirked all the responsibility, all the sorrow and suffering, that others have to face. She will never grow up—life will always be a soft, childish, happy dream for her. It’s a very easy way out.”
Morris gazed at her with the expression which both of them felt to pertain to one who knew better.
“That remains open to question,” he enunciated with thoughtful deliberation. “To those outside, the idle, the rich, the thoughtless, it may seem a sheltered life in a garden of roses—but what about the vigils and fastings and scourgings, mother?”
“Morris,” inquired his mother coldly, “what have you been reading?”