“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, and thereby with great skill bridging over the pause, “I’m not at all sure I oughtn’t to go down there myself.”
Morris raised his eyebrows, an exercise ever effectual in conveying to his mother various undutiful sentiments which could not easily have been put into words.
“To Porthlew, mother?” he inquired, aware that she meant to the convent.
“Why do you say ‘to Porthlew,’ Morris, when you know perfectly well that I don’t mean that at all? Your affectation is unbearable, and no one but your mother would put up with it. I’m forbearing and long-suffering with you, because you’re my son, but who else in the world, do you suppose, would have patience with your endless petty insincerities and your insolent manners?”
This profitless inquiry, which Nina had hurled at her son some three times a week from the date of his tenth birthday, he allowed to drop unheeded.
Nina, having voiced her annoyance that Morris had not put the obvious inquiry which she had meant him to put as to her newly-taken decision, allowed a moment to elapse, and then resumed in ordinary conversational tones:
“They know me at the convent, and they’ll let me see her, all right. I could tell in one moment how things were.”
“I should have thought Mrs. Tregaskis would be the best person to go, or Rosamund.”
“Rosamund!” Nina laughed, shrilly, as she herself recognized with inward annoyance. “Rosamund is a little girl, my dear Morris. A child is of no use. It’s a matter for a woman of the world, with tact and experience. As for poor dear Bertie, with her sledge-hammer ways, I’m afraid she’d be worse than useless. But the Superior knows me—dear Mère Pauline!”
Nina, with a slight effort, recalled the name of the Superior, and uttered it with a marked effect of intimacy.