She hastily wiped her eyes, ashamed of her emotion.
“How did it happen? Why did I become so helpless? Whose fault is it? Gilbert’s? No, I can’t think that. Other women with husbands just as bad as Gilbert don’t allow themselves to be submerged. It’s my fault; it must be. There’s something wrong with me, some horrible moral weakness.”
Her eye fell upon Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.
“No; they’re no use—only a drug. I call it training my mind, but it’s only trying to dull my feelings. I ought to fight and struggle. I must! I must! I must get hold of my children. Now when Bertie’s coming, when he hasn’t seen me for two months.... I ought to be able to do something with him. He adores me.”
She fell into a reverie upon her incorrigible boy. No doubt that Bertie was lazy, frivolous, and something a little worse—“wild,” her friends called him. And yet she never worried seriously about him. He was so obviously the sort of person who always comes out on top. It was impossible to imagine him defeated. He was the cleverest of all her children, alarmingly clever, and he was also in some ways the finest of them. He had more sensibility than his sisters, more heart. That was the reason she was so shamefully indulgent toward his follies; she was aware, almost by instinct, that they were of no significance.
She decided upon an attitude; she would not be so fond, and full of half-playful remonstrances. No; she would be friendly, but firm and wise; she would show him the significance of life.
§ ii
They went, one or the other of them, to meet all the reasonable trains.
“Why not?” said Andrée. “For mercy’s sake, what else have we to do?”
But he did not come by any of them. As a sort of punishment for his shocking lack of industry during his late year at the Polytechnic Institute, he had been banished to a solitary camp in Maine with Lance, selected as a tutor of the most serious possible sort. And as Lance—who was perfectly indifferent to the boy’s moral defects—wrote encouragingly of his mental attainments, he was allowed a two weeks’ visit to his mother and sisters.