X Eileen Seeks Counsel
I
Mrs. Ascott went out into the garden after breakfast to watch the transfer of tomato plants from the cold frames beside the garage to the loamy bed that bordered the west wall. Dutton had explained to her that nothing would thrive against the high board fence that shut the grounds from the street, at the east side of the garden—on account of the afternoon sun—and that these tomatoes would grow six feet high and would disport their fruit above the stone wall ... if the suckers were kept picked off. She wondered what suckers were, and how the afternoon sun had acquired such a sinister reputation.
She had not slept, and the April air was cool and refreshing. Mamma and the boys were safely installed in a Paris apartment. Papa had closed the big house at Pelham, taking two of the best trained servants with him to the city establishment on Riverside Drive, and was happily engrossed in the Wall Street fight for further millions—secure from the annoyance of family intrusion. She had several letters and one cablegram. How remote it all seemed, how like the hazy memory of another existence! Two months ago she was trying to forget Raoul, his amiable as well as his maddeningly offensive side. Now she seldom thought of him at all. His personality had lost its definite line and mass. Even his form was growing nebulous. She could not remember what it was that he particularly disliked for breakfast ... and whether he was growing alarmingly stout or thin when he went away to Egypt with Hilda Travers.
It was strange that she should have forgotten. Her life with him had been made up of just such things as these. She searched herself for an explanation, as the gardener rambled on, his words scarce reaching her consciousness. Slowly the imponderable thoughts assembled themselves, fashioning for her a shadow picture of her remote childhood. She was in the old kitchen at Rochester and her grandmother Holden was baking cookies for the slum children. There on the marble slab lay the great mass of yellow dough that so tempted her eager fingers. More than once she had seized a breathless opportunity, while grandma’s back was turned, to thrust an index finger far down into its golden softness. And behold! The mass had come together, leaving scarce a trace of the deep impression she had made.
Was she as plastic as dough, and had her husband gone from her life without leaving an impression? There must be something more ... something that had not worked out with precision in their case. Did not that same yielding substance take on the fairly permanent shapes of lions and camels, dancing girls and roosters with arching tails? Perhaps Raoul had neglected to bake the dough. Was she still an impressionable girl, for all her tragic experience?
II
The wicket gate opened and Eileen came towards her. The slim shoulders drooped carelessly and there was a sullen look about the too voluptuous mouth. Mrs. Ascott noticed for the first time that Eileen’s mouth was like her mother’s. All the rest of her was, as Theodora put it, “pure, unadulterated Trench” ... excepting, of course, the eyes, which were amber or vicious yellow, according to her mood. Lary had his father’s mouth; but had compromised with his mother on the question of eyes. Lavinia abhorred compromises, albeit she had learned to accept them as if they had been of her own choosing.