“There! I was sure you didn’t suspect. Though how you could have helped it—the way Syd acted, when you were here the end of January—”
“Dear old Syd! I hope he has fallen in love wisely. It would go hard with him if he should blunder.”
“I’m sure it will be all right. The difference in age doesn’t matter—and you know he will make her a noble husband. If only she doesn’t get some foolish notion of telling him all that wretched affair. I tried to caution her, in a roundabout way; but you know how stubborn Eileen is.”
“Eileen!” Judith dropped a handful of toilet articles on the dressing table and sat down, weakly.
“Mercy, Judith!” The woman’s tone carried positive contempt for such obtuseness. “He was with her every evening while you and Larimore were here, the last time. Of course they were reading Latin together, or working with the violin. But I knew what it would lead to. And it was my making her come home, after she’d been at their house three evenings a week, that did it. He missed her so dreadfully that he got over thinking about her as a little girl. Goodness knows, she’s more mature than Sylvia was at twenty—and Syd will always be a boy.”
“Has she told you?”
“No, but I wouldn’t look for her to do that. She’s been very nice to me. Oh, Judith, I hope she will tell you it’s true.”
“I’m sure it would be a great comfort to you to have her happily married.”
“Yes—but I wasn’t thinking so much about that part of it. I had my own case in mind. It would be the last straw of evidence—that all my old ideas were wrong. For the first time in my life, I want to be sure I was in the wrong.”
Her eyes glittered and her slender form seemed to dilate. She was not thinking of her cruelty to Eileen and her subsequent reluctance to admit that in her daughter’s case good might grow out of evil. Eileen was become, in her mother’s eyes, a manikin, to be posed this way and that for the studying of effects—an architect’s drawing, to serve as a pattern for the rebuilding of her mother’s life.