Her face troubled me. "I am afraid," I said, "that you are thinking Betty and I have been leaving you a good deal alone of late."
"Oh," she answered hastily, "I was not thinking about myself."
At that, of course, conscience pricked the more. "Anyhow, I have been away too much," I confessed. "And there's no excuse for me. For Betty is the one they chiefly want."
She saw I was making resolutions. "I like you two to be together," she said. "Bettina needs you more than I. I should feel much less easy in my mind about Bettina if you weren't there to watch over her, and" (she added significantly) "to tell me anything I ought to know."
As I look back, I pray that my mother did not feel we were growing away from her. But I cannot be sure some fine intuition did not visit her of the difficulty of confidence on our part—of how our very devotion and craving for her good opinion made Betty, for instance, shy of telling her things that a younger sister could easily tell to one near her own age. I knew my mother's view about the relations that should exist between mothers and daughters. I made up my mind to speak to Betty about it. So I asked her one night if she didn't think she ought to "let her know about Ranny."
"Heavens, no! She is the last person I could tell!"
I felt for my mother the wound of that. And why, I asked Bettina, did she feel so?
Almost sulkily she said that if I wanted our mother told things, I could tell her about myself.
"What on earth do you mean?" I said. "There's nothing to hear about me."
"Oh, very well," Betty said; "then there's nothing to tell."