“Yes, the name does matter. I want to get this thing down in black and white. All my life I have been discontented. It’s just one crushing disappointment after another. Eileen was the same way. I never used to think she was like me—but in some respects she is. I had a chance to marry the son of the richest man in town. But I have always been virtuous and upright—”
“Mother, perhaps if you—”
“Don’t interrupt me. I have to say this all at once, while it’s connected. You call Eileen’s discontentment and rebellious nature a kind of disease. Well then, I had the same disease, and she got it from me. After my grandmother died, there wasn’t one in the family that understood me. And the man I was engaged to—” She brought her teeth together, as if she were biting off and forcing back the words that strove to assert themselves in spite of her. “I threw him over, when I found out that he was an unprincipled scoundrel, like Hal Marksley. If I had gone on, as she did—but I never could have done such a thing.”
“Probably not. You were brought up in a provincial New York town. You were hedged about by customs and convictions that don’t obtain in Springdale, or among Eileen’s associates. You must make allowance for that.”
Lavinia sidestepped the interruption. “Eileen was sick—and God picked out a remedy that I thought God, in His purity, wouldn’t know anything about. I was taught that it was the devil that—well, I’ve been figuring that she had to come to grief, because she went over to Satan. That’s the only way I could square things with my religious training. I don’t believe, now, that she will ever be punished. That shows that it was God and not the devil that did it. I’m willing to admit that I was mistaken, if you’ll show me how to find happiness.”
“It isn’t a recipe, like the ingredients for a cake. And you must remember that I didn’t prescribe the remedy, in Eileen’s case. I only nursed her, after she had taken it. I haven’t the faintest idea why you are unhappy.”
“And I would have to tell you the whole story?”
“I wouldn’t pry into your heart. I would do anything in my power to give you peace. You are Lary’s mother. I have never overlooked my obligation to you.”
III
Lavinia took from the words an implication more humiliating than her daughter-in-law had intended. But this was no time for recrimination. She must hold on to herself. The canker in her heart had eaten so deep that help must come, or she would go mad. Mechanically she reached for the volume on the table. Her mind went back to those first years in Springdale, when she had conned Browning in an effort to shine in Mrs. Henderson’s club. Was it indeed for this that she had memorized poems, delved in abstruse literary criticism—that she might win Mrs. Henderson’s approbation? One half of her knew that it was not, while the other half as stoutly denied an ulterior motive for this, or for any other deliberate act of her life.