What the older woman said was: “I shall be more than glad to have my daughter read to me. I was just about to send for Jenny Warner. Before you came home she started to read that very book to me, but we were only at the beginning.” Gwynette flushed. “Oh, if you would rather have—” she began. But her mother, hearing the hurt tone and wishing to follow up any advantage the moment might be offering, hurriedly said: “Indeed I would far rather have you read to me than anyone else, dear Gwynette. I had not asked you because I did not know that you would care to.” There was an almost pathetic note in the voice which again carried a rebuke to the heart of the girl.
Miss Dane left them, after having arranged her patient in the comfortable reclining chair.
Gwynette, having read by herself to the chapter where Jenny had stopped, began to read aloud and the woman, leaning back luxuriously at ease, listened with a growing tenderness in her eyes. How beautiful Gwynette was, and surely there was a changed expression which had come within the last few days. What could have caused it? Why did she seem more content to remain in the country? The girl had not again mentioned the party for European travel which she had seemed so eager to join when her mother had proposed it. Half an hour later she suggested that they stop reading and visit.
“Dear,” she said, and Gwynette actually thrilled at the new tenderness in her mother’s voice, “it isn’t going to bore you as much as you thought to remain here with us?”
The girl rose and sat on a stool near the reclining chair. “Ma Mere,” she said, and there were actually tears in her eyes, “I have been very unhappy, miserably dissatisfied, and I sometimes think that what I am yearning for is love. I have had adulation,” she spoke somewhat bitterly. “I have demanded a sort of homage from the girls in my set wherever I was. I think often they grudgingly gave it. I’ve had lots of time to think about all these things during the last two weeks when Beulah and Patricia, who had been my best friends in San Francisco, were busy with final tests. I knew, when I faced the thing squarely, out there in the summer-house where I spent so many hours alone. I knew that neither of those girls really cared for me—I mean with their hearts—the way they did for each other, and it made me feel lonely—left out. I don’t know as I had ever felt that way before, and then, when I came over here, that first day after you came home, you talked about Harold with such loving tenderness, and again I felt so neglected.” She looked up, for the woman had been about to speak. “Let me finish, Ma Mere, please, for I may never again feel that I want to tell what I think. I have been locked up so long. I’ve been too proud to tell anyone that I knew Harold did not really care for me, that every little thing he did for me was because he considered it a duty.”
His mother knew this to be true, for her son had made the same confidence the day he had arrived from school. Her only comment was to lay her hand lovingly on the brown head. A caress had not occurred between these two, not since Gwynette had been a little girl.
There were unshed tears in the woman’s eyes. How blind she had been. After all, Gwynette was not entirely to blame. Well the foster-mother knew that she had encouraged the high-spirited girl to be proud and haughty. For many years Mrs. Poindexter-Jones had considered social standing of more importance than all else, but, during the long months that she had been ill, an idle watcher of the throngs who visited the famous health resort in France, something of the foolishness of it all had come to her and she had readjusted her sense of real values, scarcely knowing when it had happened. She had much to regret, much to try to undo.
“Dear girl,” she said, and there was in her voice a waver as though it were hard for her to speak, and yet she was determined to do so, “I fear I have done you a great wrong. I have taught you to be proud, to scorn worthiness in your fellow-men, or, if not exactly that, to place class distinction above it. Now I know that character is the true test of what a man is, not how much money he has or what his place in society. Of course, it is but right that we should choose our friends from among those people who interest us, but not from among those who can benefit us in a worldly way. Gwynette, daughter, is it too late for me to undo the wrong that I have done in giving you these false standards and ideals?”
Now there were indeed tears quivering on the lashes of the older woman. The girl was touched, as she never before had been. “Oh, Mother!” It was really a yearning cry. “Then you do love me. You do care?”
Miss Dane appeared at the moment and the older woman merely smiled at the girl, but with such an expression of infinite tenderness that, when the invalid had been led away, there was a most unusual warmth in Gwynette’s heart. She rose and walked down to the cliff. She wanted, oh, her mother could not know how very much she wanted to free herself from the old standards, because she admired, more than she had ever before admired anyone, the son of a mere rancher. She stood gazing at the boat and thinking so intently of these things that she did not hear footsteps near, but how her heart rejoiced when she heard a voice asking, “Will you go to the Yacht Club dance with me this evening, Miss Gwynette? Harold has procured the necessary tickets.”