“I don’t see much penalty about it,” Bertha remarked with great truth. “But, of course, in a way it’s very much better to have married later in life. One has so much more to give one’s children. I was over thirty when Hazel was born, and I’m simply thankful for it. All the added experience and confidence one had acquired—it’s all helped to make and form her little life. I do feel so strongly that a mother ought absolutely to make her child, as it were—help it and guide its development along the lines meant for it. You know——”
“Hazel always seems to me such an extraordinarily self-contained little girl,” Nina interrupted languidly.
“So she is. She gets that from me. She’s nearly as reserved as I was at her age—except, of course, with me.”
“Oh, but Bertie dear, don’t you think she gets it from her father? Frederick always strikes me as the most reserved man of my acquaintance. Though perhaps that’s only the effect of my own reserve, which I believe reacts on shy people.”
The quality popularly described as “reserve” is one to which the majority of people cling passionately. Murderer, thief, atheist if you will, but always strongly, impenetrably reserved.
“I give myself away only when I am at the piano,” Nina pursued her reflective way. “One’s art can never lie.”
“You mustn’t malign yourself, dear,” said Bertie with a hand laid fondly on her friend’s. “I assure you no one could really look upon you as reserved—for one moment. I’ve never thought you so.”
Nina gave her well-known childlike smile, and said “Dear Bertie!” with her head rather on one side.
“But you haven’t told me about Morris yet.”
“Oh, he writes from time to time—poor boy. You know—the kind of letters that tell one nothing. It’s so curious that so many many others should come to one for help or sympathy or advice and one’s own child prefer to turn elsewhere. At least I suppose he turns elsewhere. Morris is very expansive—quite unlike me,” said Nina firmly in parenthesis, “and makes every sort and kind of friend, and confides in them all without discrimination. Some day he will know, I suppose, that he has only one true friend in all the world—his mother.”