“Andrée and Edna will pay for it, out of their little savings, like sisters should, for their brother’s honour. All you have to do is to look lovely and be dignified.”
“But I don’t care to encourage those hotel people!”
“They won’t bother you when I’ve gone. Besides, you can freeze ’em thoroughly at the dinner. I don’t care how rude you are to them.”
It was a horrible dinner, of the sort that Claudine most thoroughly detested. Silly, over-dressed girls and, one or two of their mothers, and a handful of boys who seemed to her prejudiced eyes nothing but cheap travesties on her fascinating son. She was quite perfect, with the affability and politeness she never displayed so well as when among people she disliked.
But after he had gone away, she was very glad she had done this for Bertie. She missed him beyond measure; of all her children he was the one who had most of her own detached and fatalistic point of view, and he, like herself, could find but cold comfort in his own heart. She understood him, how futile all achievement seemed to him, how terribly necessary was happiness. He must be happy; it was that alone which he required from life, not success, like Andrée, not self-approbation, like Edna, but joy in the moment, like herself.
She remembered him as a little boy, a beautiful child, a gay and cajoling little thing, his grandmother’s favourite ... certainly a very much spoilt child. She liked to remember his passionate admiration of her, how she had always stopped in at the nursery to let him see her, dressed for the evening. How he had called her “pretty Mammy,” quite unabashed by his father’s disgust for his effeminacy.
Even now, with all his weaknesses, his petty vices seemed to her very innocent, very unimportant. It was only his way of looking for happiness. She felt sure that when he grew older, he would find a better way. And if he remained as he was, frivolous, reckless, pleasure-loving, wasn’t it better, after all, than being stolid, prudent, money-loving?
“My dear, dear boy!” she thought, with tears in her eyes, but a smile on her lips. “Poor Bertie!”
§ iv
The long, long summer wore away; wasted and arid days they seemed to her. She found but little pleasure in her flowers and birds, no more consolation in her philosophers.