“I wouldn’t for anything! Just give in to his silly whim—”
“It’s not a silly whim.... Andrée.... I wrote to him.”
Andrée stared at her mother’s reflection in the glass.
“What!” she cried.
Claudine opened the drawer of the dressing-table and looked into it.
“I thought—the sooner you went home, the better,” she said, in a low voice.
Andrée did not ask why. She understood very well.
§ ii
It was a marvel to Claudine that no one else had noticed. There was a certain effrontery about them both, a smiling ease, but it should not have deceived Edna. She herself had observed it the first time she had gone downstairs and seen them together. Andrée had been at the piano, and Malloy standing by her, to turn her music. She had looked up at him, and met his eyes, and it was not possible for Claudine to doubt that they understood each other too well. She could not help watching them. Malloy was attentive to Edna—rather too much so—but it was with an air of bravado, of displaying his versatility, his irresistible fascination. With a sidelong glance he would follow Andrée with his idiotic infatuation, his bedazzlement, plain in his face. The very fact that they so seldom spoke to each other made her quite sure that there was a great deal of which she knew nothing. She regarded Andrée’s cool triumph with an aching heart. She was not shocked or astounded; it is a sad truth that no perfidy or evil could shock that woman. She was willing to believe both the best and the worst of anyone; whatever was presented to her, she accepted. She believed that now she was seeing the very worst of Andrée, the selfishness, the recklessness, the cruelty, which she knew better than anyone else. She didn’t blame Malloy; not much was to be expected from him. He was kind-hearted and manly, and so on, but wax in hands like Andrée’s. He didn’t love Andrée; he wouldn’t have thought of her if she hadn’t made him. He had been happy with Edna, and he would be again—if he were let alone. And Andrée didn’t love him; she would forget him. If it were stopped now.
That is the reason that Claudine had written to her son-in-law.