“He will do what he thinks right.”
“Then you do agree that he is a force? I feel that so strongly about him.”
Professor Smallman smiled in his charming, uninterested way.
“Not much good being a force if you are an economist. That’s specialist’s work. Even business would be better.”
And Linda began to map out a career for René—business, the city council, Parliament, and thereafter—who knows?
René was very docile. His friendship for Linda made life more gracious, more full, and he was shedding the awkwardness that had grown on him during his two years of solitude. He was able to go to Professor Smallman’s whenever he liked, and other houses had been thrown open to him.
At first he had endeavored to bring the new spirit that he had won into his life at home, but his father had become merely ribald, and in his mother the spark of feeling that had been struck out of her on his return from Scotland had died away and would not come again. What she felt and thought she concealed with chatter, and too many of her notes were now exasperatingly echoes of her husband’s. For a short while René went through an agony of shame when he felt his parents as a drag on him, and he could never return home without an acute feeling of sadness. To counteract this he used to talk to Linda of his mother as she had been before his father’s return, brave, humorous, quick to see and to understand. In such talk Linda delighted, and she made him promise to introduce her to his household.
It was arranged.
“Afternoon tea, I suppose,” said Mrs. Fourmy. “Thin bread and butter in the parlor.”
“I think she’d like what we always have. She particularly said you weren’t to make any fuss.”