Mrs. Drover set down her own cup. Lines of disapproval hardened about her small concise mouth; but she had evidently resolved to restrain herself to the last limit of sisterly forbearance.
“Now, my dear, do sit down again and drink your tea quietly. What good will all this worrying do? You look feverish—and as thin as a rail. Are you sure you haven’t picked up one of those dreadful tropical microbes?... Of course, I understand your being unhappy at parting so soon again with Anne.... She feels it too; I know she does. It’s a pity you couldn’t have been together a little longer, just you two; but then—. And, after all, since Anne wants you to keep the Fifth Avenue house for yourself, why shouldn’t the young people buy that property just round the corner? Then the lower floors of the two houses could be thrown into one for entertaining. I’m not clever about plans, but Lilla’ll tell you exactly how it could be done. She’s got hold of such a clever young architect to modernize their Baltimore house. Of course, though Horace didn’t realize it, it was all library; no room for dancing. And I daresay Anne—not that Anne ever cared much for dancing.... But I hear Major Fenno likes going out, and a young wife can’t make a greater mistake than to have a dull house if her husband is fond of gaiety. Lilla, now, has quite converted Horace—”
Kate Clephane had reseated herself and was automatically turning the spoon about in her cup. “It won’t happen; it can’t be; he’ll never dare.” The thought, flashing in on her aching brain, suddenly quieted her, helped her to compose her features, and even to interject the occasional vague murmur which was all her sister-in-law needed to feed her flow of talk. The mention of the Maclews and their clever architect had served to deflect the current of Mrs. Drover’s thoughts, and presently she was describing how wonderfully Lilla managed Horace, and how she and the architect had got him to think he could not live without the very alterations he had begun by resolutely opposing, on the ground that they were both extravagant and unnecessary.
“Just an innocent little conspiracy, you know.... They completely got the better of him, and now he’s delighted, and tells everybody it was his own idea,” Mrs. Drover chuckled; and then, her voice softening, and a plump hand reassuringly outstretched to Mrs. Clephane: “You’ll see, my dear, after you get over the first loneliness, what a lovely thing it is to have one’s child happily married.”
“It won’t happen; it can’t be; he’ll never dare!” the other mother continued to murmur to herself.
Horace Maclew, among numerous other guests, arrived for dinner. He sat nearly opposite Mrs. Clephane, and in the strange whirl and dazzle that surrounded her she instinctively anchored her gaze on his broad frame and ponderous countenance. What had his marriage done to him, she wondered, and what weight had it given him in the counsels of his new family? She had known of him but vaguely before, as the conscientious millionaire who collects works of art and relieves suffering; she imagined him as having been brought up by equally conscientious parents, themselves wealthy and scrupulous, and sincerely anxious to transmit their scruples, with their millions, to their only son. But other influences and tendencies had also been in play; one could fancy him rather heavily adjusting them to his inherited principles, with the “After all” designed to cover venial lapses. His marriage with Lilla must have been the outcome, the climax, of these private concessions, and have prepared him to view most of the problems of life from an easier angle. Undoubtedly, among the men present, though no quicker-witted than the others, he would have been the one most likely to understand Kate Clephane’s case, could she have put it to him. But to do so—one had only to intercept their glances across the table to be sure of it—would have been to take Lilla also into her confidence; and it suddenly became clear to Mrs. Clephane that no recoil of horror, and no Pharisaical disapproval, would be as intolerable to her as Lilla’s careless stare and Lilla’s lazy: “Why, what on earth’s all the fuss about? Don’t that sort of thing happen all the time?”
It did, no doubt; Mrs. Clephane had already tried to adjust her own mind to that. She had known such cases; everybody had; she had seen them smoothed over and lived down; but that she and Anne should ever figure as one of them was beyond human imagining. She would have felt herself befouled to the depths by Lilla’s tolerance.
Her unquiet eyes wandered from Horace Maclew to her daughter. Anne shone with recovered joy. Her anxiety had left only the happy traces of a summer shower on a drooping garden. Every now and then she smiled across the table at her mother, and Kate felt herself irresistibly smiling back. There was something so rich, dense and impregnable in the fact of possessing Anne’s heart that the mother could not remember to be alarmed when their eyes met.
Suddenly she noticed that Anne was absorbed in conversation with one of her neighbours. This was the Reverend Dr. Arklow, Rector of St. Stephen’s, the New York church of the Clephane and Drover clan. Old Mrs. Clephane had been a pillar of St. Stephen’s, and had bequeathed a handsome sum to the parish. Dr. Arklow, formerly the curate, had come back a few years previously as Rector of the church, and was now regarded as one of the foremost lights of the diocese, with a strong possibility of being named its Coadjutor, or possibly Bishop of the American Episcopal Churches in Europe.