"But it's so. Listen," she urged tremulously. "Now I—I just can't like the kind of music Burke does,—discords, and no tune, you know,—though I've tried and tried to. Day after day I've gone into the music-room and put in those records,—the classics and the operatic ones that are the real thing, you know,—but I can't like them; and I still keep liking tunes and ragtime. And there are the books, too. I can't help liking jingles and stories that tell something; and I don't like poetry—not real poetry like Browning and all the rest of them."
"Browning, indeed! As if that counted, child!"
"Oh, but it's other things—lots of them; vague, elusive things that I can't put my finger on. But I know them now, since I've been here with your sister and her friends. Why, sometimes it isn't anything more than the way a woman speaks, or the way she sits down and gets up, or even the way a bit of lace falls over her hand. But they all help. And they've helped me, too,—oh, so much. I'm so glad now of this chance to thank you. You don't know—you can't know, what it's been for me—to be here."
"But I thought you just said that you—you couldn't—that is, that you'd—er—given up," floundered the doctor miserably, as if groping for some sort of support on a topsy-turvy world.
"Given up? Perhaps I have—in a way—for myself. You see, I know now that you have to begin young. That's why I'm so happy about Betty. I don't mind about myself any more, if only I can make it all right for her. Dr. Gleason, I couldn't—I just couldn't have her father ashamed of—Betty!"
"Ashamed of that child! Well, I should say not," blustered the doctor incoherently; "nor of you, either, you brave little woman. Why—"
"Betty is a dear, isn't she?" interrupted the mother eagerly. "You do think she'll—she'll be everything he could wish? I'm keeping him always before her—what he likes, how he'd want her to do, you know. And almost always I can make her mind now, with daddy's name, and—"
The doctor interrupted with a gesture of impatience.
"My dear lady, can't you see that now—right now is just the time for you to go back to your husband?"
The eager, pleading, wistful-eyed little mother opposite became suddenly the dignified, stern-eyed woman.