She looked at the three faces, at that clever and devilish Bertie, at the sensible, clear-sighted Edna, at Andrée, filled with a strange and wayward inner light.
“But you can’t enjoy that sort of thing!” she cried. “You can’t like to be there, in a room crowded with vulgar, noisy people whom you don’t even know! You must see that these new dances are—to say the very least—ill-bred!”
“I accept!” said Bertie. “Lance was telling me about some fellow that made that his motto, and I think it’s a gol-durned good one! I accept—anything that comes my way.”
“But it doesn’t mean that, Bertie. It means resignation.”
“I know. And we are all resigned, except you. You want to—let’s see—put back the clock of human progress. Very wrong Mammy!”
§ iii
The next morning Bertie went again to the big hotel, and came back innocently with a new magazine for his mother. In the afternoon he went down to the garage and drove back in the startling purple car, and asked his mother to come for a drive. Filled with terror, she accepted, and spent two hours in mortal anguish, flying perilously along the edge of precipices, breathless from the terrific speed. There was no chance then for the serious talk she wished to have with her son, and after dinner he disappeared again, and didn’t return until midnight.
But she was waiting for him on the veranda.
“Bertie!” she said. “Where have you been?”
“Dancing around a little, Mammy!”