“You forget that I’ve a grown-up daughter, Madame Berthe.”
“Allons, Madame plaisante!”
She drew herself up with dignity. “A daughter of twenty-one; I’m joining her in New York next week. What would she think of me if I arrived in a hat more youthful than hers? Show me something darker, please: yes, the one with the autumn leaves. See, I’m growing gray on the temples—don’t try to make me look like a flapper. What’s the price of that blue fox over there? I like a gray fur with gray hair.”
In the end she stalked out, offended by the milliner’s refusal to take her gray hair seriously, and reflecting, with a retrospective shiver, that her way of dressing and her demeanour must have thoroughly fixed in all these people’s minds the idea that she was one of the silly vain fools who imagine they look like their own daughters.
At the dress-maker’s, the scene repeated itself. The dashing little frock prepared for her—an orange silk handkerchief peeping from the breast-pocket on which an anchor was embroidered—made her actually blush; and reflecting that money wouldn’t “matter” now (the thought of the money had really not come to her before) she persuaded the dress-maker to take the inappropriate garment back, and ordered, instead, something sober but elaborate, and ever so much more expensive. It seemed a part of the general unreal rapture that even the money-worry should have vanished.
Where should she lunch? She inclined to a quiet restaurant in a back street; then the old habit of following the throng, the need of rubbing shoulders with a crowd of unknown people, swept her automatically toward the Casino, and sat her down, in a blare of brass instruments and hard sunshine, at the only table left. After all, as she had often heard Chris say, one could feel more alone in a crowd.... But gradually it came over her that to feel alone was not in the least what she wanted. She had never, for years at any rate, been able to bear it for long; the crowd, formerly a solace and an escape, had become a habit, and being face to face with her own thoughts was like facing a stranger. Oppressed and embarrassed, she tried to “make conversation” with herself; but the soundless words died unuttered, and she sought distraction in staring about her at the unknown faces.
Their number became oppressive: it made her feel small and insignificant to think that, of all this vulgar feasting throng, not one knew the amazing thing which had befallen her, knew that she was awaited by an only daughter in a big house in New York, a house she would re-enter in a few days—yes, actually in a few days—with the ease of a long-absent mistress, a mistress returning from an immense journey, but to whom it seems perfectly natural and familiar to be once again smiling on old friends from the head of her table.
The longing to be with people to whom she could tell her news made her decide, after all, to live out her day as she had originally planned it. Before leaving the hotel she had announced her departure to the astonished Aline (it was agreeable, for once, to astonish Aline) and despatched her to the post-office with a cable for New York and a telegram for a Paris steamship company. In the cable she had said simply: “Coming darling.” They were the words with which she used to answer little Anne’s calls from the nursery: that impatient reiterated “Mummy—Mummy—I want my Mummy!” which had kept on echoing in her ears through so many sleepless nights. The phrase had flashed into her head the moment she sat down to write the cable, and she had kept murmuring to herself ever since: “Mummy—Mummy—I want my Mummy!” She would have liked to quote the words to Mrs. Minity, whose door she was now approaching; but how could she explain to the old lady, who was deaf and self-absorbed, and thought it a privilege for any one to go driving with her, why little Anne’s cry had echoed so long in the void? No; she could not speak of that to any one: she must stick to her old “take-it-for-granted” attitude, the attitude which had carried her successfully over so many slippery places.
Mrs. Minity was very much pre-occupied about her foot-warmer. She spent the first quarter of an hour in telling Mrs. Clephane that the Rector’s wife, whom she had taken out the day before, had possessed herself of the object without so much as a “may I,” and kept her big feet on it till Mrs. Minity had had to stop the carriage and ask the coachman in a loud voice how it was that The Foot-warmer had not been put in as usual. Whereupon, if you please, Mrs. Merriman had simply said: “Oh, I have it, thanks, dear Mrs. Minity—such a comfort, on these windy days!” “Though why a woman who keeps no carriage, and has to tramp the streets at all hours, should have cold feet I can’t imagine—nor, in fact, wholly believe her when she says so,” said Mrs. Minity, in the tone of one to whom a defective circulation is the recognized prerogative of carriage-owners. “I notice, my dear, that you never complain of being cold,” she added approvingly, relegating Kate, as an enforced pedestrian, to Mrs. Merriman’s class, but acknowledging in her a superior sense of propriety. “I’m always glad,” she added, “to take you out on windy days, for battling with the mistral on foot must be so very exhausting, and in the carriage, of course, it is so easy to reach a sheltered place.”
Mrs. Minity was still persuaded that to sit in her hired victoria, behind its somnolent old pair, was one of the most rapid modes of progression devised by modern science. She talked as if her carriage were an aeroplane, and was as particular in avoiding narrow streets, and waiting at the corner when she called for friends who lived in them, as if she had to choose a safe alighting-ground.