“Oh, yes; perfectly well. Perfectly well!” Kate repeated joyously. But she continued to lean back, staring vacantly ahead of her, till Aline admonished her, as she had done when the other message came, that the chocolate would be getting cold.
A respite—a respite. Oh, yes, it was at least a respite!
XI.
THERE was something so established and reassuring in the mere look of Enid Drover’s drawing-room that Kate Clephane, waiting there that afternoon for her sister-in-law to come in, felt a distinct renewal of confidence.
The house was old Mrs. Clephane’s wedding gift to her daughter, and everything in it had obviously been selected by some one whose first thought concerning any work of art was to ask if it would chip or fade. Nothing in the solid and costly drawing-room had chipped or faded; it had retained something of Enid’s invulnerable youthfulness, and, like herself, had looked as primly old-fashioned in its first bloom as in its well-kept maturity.
It was odd that so stable a setting should have produced that hurricane of a Lilla; and Kate smiled at the thought of the satisfaction with which the very armchairs, in their cushioned permanence, would welcome her back to domesticity.
But Mrs. Drover, when she appeared, took it on a higher plane. Had Lilla ever been unstable, or in any way failed to excel? If so, her mother, and her mother’s background, showed no signs of remembering. The armchairs stood there stolidly, as if asking what you meant by such ideas. Enid was a little troubled—she confessed—by the fact that Horace Maclew was a widower, and so much older than her child. “I’m not sure if such a difference of age is not always a risk.... But then Mr. Maclew is a man of such strong character, and has behaved so generously.... There will be such opportunities for doing good....”
Opportunities for doing good! It was on the tip of Kate’s tongue to say: “Ah, that must have been Lilla’s reason for accepting him!”; but Mrs. Drover was serenely continuing: “He has given her all the pearls already. She’s bringing them back tomorrow to be restrung.” And Kate understood that, for the present, the opportunities for doing good lay rather with the bridegroom than the bride.
“Of course,” Mrs. Drover went on, “it will be a great sacrifice for her father and me to let her go; though luckily Baltimore is not far off. And it will be a serious kind of life; a life full of responsibilities. Hendrik is afraid that, just at first, Lilla may miss the excitements of New York; but I think I know my child better. When Lilla is really happy no one cares less than she does for excitement.”
The phrase gave Kate’s nerves a sudden twist. It was just what Chris used to say when she urged him to settle down to his painting—at least on the days when he didn’t say that excitement was necessary to the artist.... She looked at her sister-in-law’s impenetrable pinkness, and thought: “It might be Mrs. Minity speaking.”