“I am thinking only of your father. This will bring his white hairs in sorrow to the grave.”
“I have told father,” said Annette
Mrs. Folyat was too far gone in sentimentality—forged sentiment—to feel anything. She had chosen what she thought the most appropriate and effective method of attack, only to find it parried. She clutched blindly at the first seemingly fit words that came to her mind, those which had already been used by Mrs. Lawrie:
“As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it.”
Serge rose and said:
“That is no reason why you should try to make it more uncomfortable, mother.”
Mrs. Folyat hardly heard him. She had begun to think (the specially ordained scourge of the sentimentalist) what people would say of her; not what they would say of Annette: she was incapable of seeing the affair from Annette’s point of view. One of her darling fictions, that of her perfect motherhood, was menaced. She was a she-lioness to protect it: her fictions were to her what her children might have been. With incisive and bitter sarcasm she assailed Annette for the space of two minutes. She predicted that Bennett would take to drink, that he would desert her, that there would be a scandal, and she (Mrs. Folyat) would never be able to hold up her head again. When she could find no more baneful prognostications to throw at her offending daughter’s head, she took refuge in tears and began to declare that she wished that she were dead, since all the love she had lavished on her children was to be returned with such ingratitude. They were all ungrateful, all, all—except dear Frederic—and she wished she had never had a daughter. . . . Annette bore it all meekly, though she was very near breaking down. It had all seemed so simple to her: she loved, she was obeying her love, and all this made it so complicated. . . . Serge’s blood boiled, but he said nothing. He saw that Annette was in an impregnable position, not to be undermined.
Very quietly Annette said:
“I am going to-night, mother. I told father I would stay until to-morrow, but he said I had better go to-night.”