Lita was still leaning on her elbow. "Well—isn't he?" she said in her cool silvery voice, with innocently widened eyes.
For an instant the significance of the retort escaped Pauline. When it reached her she felt as humiliated as if she had been caught concealing a guilty secret. She opened her lips, but no sound came from them. She sat wordless, torn between the desire to box her daughter-in-law's ears, and to rush in tears from the house.
"Lita ..." she gasped ... "this insult..."
Lita sat up, her eyes full of a slightly humorous compunction. "Oh, no! An insult! Why? I've always thought it would be so wonderful to have a love-child. I supposed that was why you both worshipped Jim. And now he isn't even that!" She shrugged her slim shoulders, and held her hands out penitently. "I am sorry to have said the wrong thing—honestly I am! But it just shows we can never understand each other. For me the real wickedness is to go on living with a man you don't love. And now I've offended you by supposing you once felt in the same way yourself..."
Pauline slowly rose to her feet: she felt stiff and shrunken. "You haven't offended me—I'm not going to allow myself to be offended. I'd rather think we don't understand each other, as you say. But surely it's not too late to try. I don't want to discuss things with you; I don't want to nag or argue; I only want you to wait, to come with the baby to Cedarledge, and spend a few quiet weeks with us. Nona will be there, and my husband ... there'll be no reproaches, no questions ... but we'll do our best to make you happy..."
Lita, with her funny twisted smile, moved toward her mother-in-law. "Why, you're actually crying! I don't believe you do that often, do you?" She bent forward and put a light kiss on Pauline's shrinking cheek. "All right—I'll come to Cedarledge. I am dead-beat and fed-up, and I daresay it'll do me a lot of good to lie up for a while..."
Pauline, for a moment, made no answer: she merely laid her lips on the girl's cheek, a little timidly, as if it had been made of something excessively thin and brittle.
"We shall all be very glad," she said.
On the doorstep, in the motor, she continued to move in the resonance of the outrageous question: "Well—isn't he?" The violence of her recoil left her wondering what use there was in trying to patch up a bond founded on such a notion of marriage. Would not Jim, as his wife so lightly suggested, run more chance of happiness if he could choose again? Surely there must still be some decent right-minded girls brought up in the old way ... like Aggie Heuston, say! But Pauline's imagination shivered away from that too... Perhaps, after all, her own principles were really obsolete to her children. Only, what was to take their place? Human nature had not changed as fast as social usage, and if Jim's wife left him nothing could prevent his suffering in the same old way.
It was all very baffling and disturbing, and Pauline did not feel as sure as she usually did that the question could be disposed of by ignoring it. Still, on the drive home her thoughts cleared as she reflected that she had gained her main point—for the time, at any rate. Manford had enjoined her not to estrange or frighten Lita, and the two women had parted with a kiss. Manford had insisted that Lita should be induced to take no final decision till after her stay at Cedarledge; and to this also she had acquiesced. Pauline, on looking back, began to be struck by the promptness of Lita's surrender, and correspondingly impressed by her own skill in manœuvring. There was something, after all, in these exercises of the will, these smiling resolves to ignore or dominate whatever was obstructive or unpleasant! She had gained with an almost startling ease the point which Jim and Manford and Nona had vainly struggled for. And perhaps Lita's horrid insinuation had not been a voluntary impertinence, but merely the unconscious avowal of new standards. The young people nowadays, for all their long words and scientific realism, were really more like children than ever...