Her chief claims to moral excellence were these: that she had borne six children, and that she had lived for sixty years; and above all because of her marvelous lack of sensibility, an imperviousness which no actual image of Buddha could have surpassed. She had looked on at suffering, anguish, despair, unmoved, and that was fortitude; she had witnessed birth, death, without a gleam of curiosity or speculation, and that was common sense. She had been “just” toward her little children with all the blindness proper to that virtue.
“It makes no difference why you do things,” she always said. “A thing’s right, or it’s wrong. I don’t want to hear your reasons.”
He recognized the old familiar attitude now, the old air of saying—“Very well; go your own way, and learn by bitter experience!” Within herself he felt she was saying—“You’ll have to reap what you sow. You’ll make your bed and you’ll have to lie in it.” And so on.
“You don’t approve of my marrying her then, do you?” he asked.
“You’re twenty-five years old,” said his mother, “You’re old enough to decide for yourself.”
He felt more irritated than his ideas of filial piety allowed. He drank his coffee slowly and reminded himself that his mother was a widow and that all her other children had married and left her. His thoughts were readily distracted that day, though, and good-will very easy to him. He sat back, lighted a cigar and looked about him, at the dismal basement dining-room, used for all the family meals, with its barred windows through which one could see the feet of passersby, and the horrible walnut buffet and sideboard and the massive square table, and the twelve chairs, three invalided and permanently in corners, the faded carpet that had once been upstairs, the immense crayon picture of a lion’s head, the general economical hideousness of this room which proclaimed the old lady’s genial idea that anything was good enough for the inmates of the house, and the owner. He had never liked the room, but he fancied it this morning as it might be—a Paradise, with the charm, the youth, the mysterious strangeness of a young wife in it.
Here, without question, the young wife would have to come, because Gilbert could not and would not consider leaving his mother alone. And to be candid, dared not. He owed everything to his mother, he said. Hadn’t she made sacrifices to give her children every advantage, lessons of various sorts, and unstinted moral advice? She talked candidly of moulding their characters, and that is just what she had done. She had moulded them in her own image, supreme and devastating blasphemy. They were all of them like fainter copies of her own sharply written character. This man sitting across the breakfast table from her now was literally made by her. By nature credulous and imitative, he had lent himself perfectly to her manipulations; he thought exactly as she had taught him to think; he disagreed with her in some points, because she had taught him that a man must in certain respects disagree with women; he knew things, he had had experiences unknown to her, but she had caused him to believe, sadly, that a man must so conduct himself. She had taught him that, as a man, he must disappoint his mother. She despised him a little, but she certainly, undeniably loved him.
She looked at him, stalwart black-avised fellow, with his heavy brows and his obstinate mouth. Wasn’t he manly, she thought!
“Ah, well!” she said with a sigh. “No doubt it’s all for the best, Gilbert.”
He finished his breakfast in manly silence,—which no decent woman dare trouble—and getting up, went round the table to his mother, dutifully to kiss her good-bye.