“I regret nothing,” her eyes seemed to say.
She had no plans. She did not know what she would do after leaving me. How was every one? Was Mrs. O’Gorman still living? No. She was sorry. She had been hoping to talk with her. How splendid, though, to find Suzanne!
She seemed to be shy of referring to Rose again. I could not help noticing it. Every silence seemed to be filled intensely with consideration of her relations with her child and her child’s attitude to her. She must have given endless thought to this matter, but to be so near brought it all back more vividly and critically.
“I suppose—” she began once and stopped, and I knew that the rest of the sentence would have been—“she knows”: meaning “she knows about me and Ronnie?” Did daughters, she must often have asked herself, forgive mothers who run away from them with other men?
Perhaps it was because her mind had travelled thus far that she suddenly said again, “Dombeen, remember this. No matter how sad I may seem to be, now and then, remember this: I regret nothing. Ronnie needed me more than anyone.”
Then she became gayer and smiled her old smile.
“And you?” she said. “How are you? What beautiful white hair!”
“I am seventy,” I said. “Nothing else is the matter. But I always maintain that white hair is beautiful only on the heads of others.”
She came at last to Rose again by a more direct route. “Those pictures”—looking at the walls—“are they hers?”
I said that they were. I had told her in my letters of Rose’s painting.