Morris laughed a little.
“You could hardly count on her remembering you, could you, considering that it’s nearly two years since you went down for those few days, and were so terribly bored? I shall never forget coming down to fetch you home, and how thankful you were to get away from it all!”
“Morris,” said Nina with dignity, replying to the spirit which had prompted this ingeniously perverted reminiscence, “if you can speak like that to your widowed mother, there is no more to be said to you.”
Nina seldom claimed official rank, as it were, as Morris’ widowed mother, until the last outpost of her endurance had been reached, and as Morris was in reality sincerely grateful to her for never having presented him with a stepfather, he changed his tactics.
“Of course, you could quite well go down from here for the day, but do you really think there’s anything wrong? If she was really ill, they’d send for Mrs. Tregaskis, I suppose. Anyway, she’s always been more or less delicate, hasn’t she?”
“That sort of quiet, regular life ought to have made her quite strong,” said Nina negligently. “I must say, though, this is the first time one’s heard of her having a day’s illness there. The ungrateful little thing has never written to me, either, except one rather stilted, affected letter, just after she’d been given her religious habit. Evidently she was so pleased with the novelty of it all, she couldn’t help rather playing a part. Poor little thing! It didn’t ring quite true, somehow, when she spoke of praying for one, and signed herself, ‘Yours affectionately in Christ, Sister Frances Mary.’”
Morris laughed, with a note of indulgence that appeared to Nina’s sensitive perceptions to savour somewhat too nearly of superiority.
“That sort of posing never rings quite true, if very young people would only realize it,” she said, skillfully transferring her condemnation from the particular to the general, whence it might safely be assumed to include her son.
“Frances was anything but a poseuse, mother.”
“My dear boy, you haven’t the least idea—how could you at your age—of the effect that an atmosphere of that sort can have on a silly, impressionable girl. Poor little Frances probably wrote in that exaggerated convent style simply because she thought it would impress me with her holiness,” said the discerning Mrs. Severing.