"I can't."
"Will you play with me?"
"There is nothing here."
"I brought the second volume of Beethoven with me."
"I will try," promised Eleanor.
Richard spread the music open on the rack. Both had been trained by Thomasina, both played easily and well, both knew their parts. Shoulders and hands touched; sometimes Richard laughed aloud from sheer pleasure, sometimes he sang an air, sometimes he stopped to give directions. At that Eleanor laughed a little nervously. Richard seemed to all his mates to hold himself above them, to be dictatorial. He had seemed all of this to Eleanor, but now she obeyed instantly.
In the bay window Mrs. Bent sat and watched. She could not have looked at them with anything but pleasure. Eleanor was so young, so pretty. There was no mother in Waltonville who would not have been pleased to see her daughter playing duets with Richard Lister.
But a shadow had settled on Mrs. Bent's face. The look which had transfigured her changed to a look of anxiety and trouble. She had years ago made wise plans for her life and Eleanor's—they had begun to seem now not wise, but insane. They were wicked, because they were made in one of the rages into which she had fallen, like her father, in her youth; they were stupid, because they had taken no account of the future; and they were selfish, because they had taken no account of anything but her own fury.
When Dr. Green drove by in his buggy, Mrs. Bent laid her hand with a gesture which was almost melodramatic across her heart, and stared after him, as though the sight of him had for an instant illuminated her despair. In another instant, however, the shadow returned to her face and she bent over her sewing.