Mademoiselle was conscious of an actual physical drag at her heartstrings. The pulsating glow of her young loveliness had never been more moving and oh! the sublime certainty of her unconsciousness that Life lay between this hour and that day when she was “quite old and not pretty any more” and having made economies could die in a little cottage in the country! She believed in her vision as she had believed that Donal would come to her in the garden.
Upon Feather the revelation that her daughter had elected to join the ranks of girls who were mysteriously determined to be responsible for themselves produced a curious combination of effects. It was presented to her by Lord Coombe in the form of a simple impersonal statement which had its air of needing no explanation. She heard it with eyes widening a little and a smile slowly growing. Having heard, she broke into a laugh, a rather high-pitched treble laugh.
“Really?” she said. “She is really going to do it? To take a situation! She wants to be independent and ‘live her own life!’ What a joke—for a girl of mine!” She was either really amused or chose to seem so.
“What do you think of it?” she asked when she stopped laughing. Her eyes had curiosity in them.
“I like it,” he answered.
“Of course. I ought to have remembered that you helped her to an Early Victorian duchess. She’s one without a flaw—the Dowager Duchess of Darte. The most conscientiously careful mother couldn’t object. It’s almost like entering into the kingdom of heaven—in a dull way.” She began to laugh again as if amusing images rose suddenly before her. “And what does the Duchess think of it?” she said after her laughter had ceased again. “How does she reconcile herself to the idea of a companion whose mother she wouldn’t have in her house?”
“We need not enter into that view of the case. You decided some years ago that it did not matter to you whether Early Victorian duchesses included you in their visiting lists or did not. More modern ones do I believe—quite beautiful and amusing ones.”
“But for that reason I want this one and those like her. They would bore me, but I want them. I want them to come to my house and be polite to me in their stuffy way. I want to be invited to their hideous dinner parties and see them sitting round their tables in their awful family jewels ‘talking of the sad deaths of kings.’ That’s Shakespeare, you know. I heard it last night at the theatre.”
“Why do you want it?” Coombe inquired.
“When I ask you why you show your morbid interest in Robin, you say you don’t know. I don’t know—but I do want it.”