“My dear boy, it’s perfectly childish to talk like that. How can there be anything about you which I, your mother, can’t understand? It makes one realize how very very young you are, when you talk like that.”
But even allusions to his youth could not disturb Morris’s exalted mood.
He was unable to resist giving his mother a hint of the heights to which he had attained.
“I was up at Porthlew this afternoon,” he said in a meaning tone.
“So I supposed. You always come back in this silly, self-satisfied frame of mind when you’ve been with those girls, who naturally play up to your vanity. If that’s the effect of the Grantham girl’s influence, Morris, the less you see of her the better, for your own sake.”
The fatal word “influence,” combined with the preposterous implication that Nina had slightingly forgotten Miss Grantham’s very name, roused Morris to anger at last.
“Rosamund Grantham and I have said good-bye, mother. It was the only way. Some day I shall come back to her, and find her waiting,” said Morris, considerably worked up by the pathos of his own eloquence, and momentarily forgetful that he had received no such pledge. “But you make it impossible that I should tell you anything of what I am going through, when you speak as you did just now.”
He walked with sorrowful dignity to the door, confident that his mother would not allow him to leave the room without giving him further opportunities for rhetoric.
Nina, in effect, finding herself driven to her last resort, with a readiness born of much experience, began gently to cry.
“Darling, you know I didn’t mean it if I spoke impatiently. I only want to sympathize with you and comfort you.”