It sounded perfectly simple and sensible; Anne spoke of it in her usual matter-of-course tone. Her mother tried for the same intonation in answering, with a faint touch of surprise: “Lilla too?”
Anne turned around completely and smiled. “Oh, Lilla particularly! You mustn’t speak of it yet, please—not even to Aunt Enid—but there’s a chance ... a chance of Lilla’s marrying.”
Kate’s heart gave a great bound of relief or resentment—which? Why, relief, she instantly assured herself. She had been right then—that was the key to the mystery! And why not? After all, what did it matter to her? Had she, Kate, ever imagined that Chris’s love-affairs would cease when she passed from his life? Wasn’t it most probably in pursuit of a new one that he had left her? To think so had been, at any rate, in spite of the torturing images evoked, more bearable than believing he had gone because he was tired of her. For years, as she now saw, she had been sustained by her belief in that “other woman”; only, that she should take shape in Lilla was unbelievably humiliating.
Anne continued to smile softly down on her mother. In her smile there was something veiled and tender, as faint as sunlight refracted from water—a radiance striking up from those mysterious depths that Kate had never yet reached. “We should all be so glad if it happened,” the girl continued; and Kate said to herself: “What she’s really thinking of when she smiles in that way is her own marriage....” She remembered the cryptic allusion of the football-faced youth at the Opera, and the way those vigilant lids of Anne’s had shut down on her vision.
“Of course—poor Lilla!” Mrs. Clephane absently assented. Inwardly she was saying to herself that it would be impossible for her to go to Baltimore on that particular errand. Chris and Lilla—Chris and Lilla! The coupled names began again to jangle maddeningly through her brain. She stood up and moved away to the window. No, she couldn’t!
“Next week, dear? It doesn’t matter—but I think you’ll have to go without me.” She spoke from the window, without turning her head toward her daughter, who had gone back to the easel.
“Oh—.” There was distinct disappointment in Anne’s voice.
“The fact is I’ve made two or three dinner engagements; I don’t think I can very well break them, do you? People have been so awfully kind—all my old friends,” Kate stammered, while the “couldn’t, couldn’t” kept booming on in her ears. “Besides,” she added, “why not take Nollie instead? A young party will be more amusing for Mr. Maclew.”
Anne laughed. “Oh, I don’t believe he’ll notice Nollie and me,” she said with a gay significance; but added at once: “Of course you must do exactly as you please. That’s the foundation of our agreement, isn’t it?”
“Our agreement?”