In the silence that followed these words Mame hardly ventured to look at the face of the woman who sat by her side. But she saw that Lady Kidderminster’s eyes were wet. This was a brave woman. It was impossible not to respect her point of view. Indeed, seated in that room, with all those associations clustering about it, there seemed to be only one way of looking at things. And that was the way of Bill’s mother.
XLVI
MAME returned to London after an absence of exactly one week. Seldom had she been more eager for anything than to exchange the rather dreary stuffiness of the Dower House for the life and bustle of the town. Yet the Mame Durrance who had left Paddington a week ago was not the same person who came back to that terminus. Something had happened to her in the meantime. As yet she did not quite know what the something was. But there were the beginnings of a new habit of introspection in her; and from this she learned that she was in the throes of change.
Life, somehow, was not quite as she had left it. She seemed to see it with new eyes. Even the buses and the taxis and the faces of the passers-by were different from what they had been a week ago. They seemed to strike her in a new way. It was as if the rather trite and funny old world she had always lived in had become suddenly enlarged. Everything had grown more complex. The inner nature of things, about which she was troubling for the first time, was full of deep and mysterious meaning.
This state of mind did not make for happiness, as Mame soon discovered. For one thing it was out of harmony with the mentality of a practical go-getter. But as she expressed the phenomenon to herself, that old house had put one over on her. It was absurd that a mere inanimate collection of sticks and stones should have the power to do anything of the kind, yet it was not a bit of use shirking the fact that it had done so.
There were two Mame Durrances now. Perhaps there always had been, but the one the old house in Shropshire had evoked had lain dormant. And now that it was aroused it promised to become a mighty inconvenient yoke fellow. Hitherto it had been the go-getter who had held command of the ship; a common-sensible, up-and-coming, two-and-two-makes-four sort of unit, who saw its duty a dead sure thing and went and did it. But the sleeper, whom one week of Shropshire had awakened, was a very different kind of bird.
No doubt, the new and tiresome entity that had sprung to birth was what the world meant by an idealist. It appeared to judge by another standard. There were the things you could do and the things you couldn’t do. The business part of Mame knew nothing of this. It only did the things it wanted to do.
A week of the Dower House had rather handed a haymaker to Mame’s utilitarian world. To such an extent had it mixed its values that she did not quite know where she stood in it. Yet amid the chaos she retained in a high degree her natural clearness of vision.
It was nearing the dinner hour when Mame’s taxi deposited her and her neat luggage at 16b Half Moon Street. Lady Violet, wearing her smartest evening frock, was on the point of going out. She greeted Mame with the air of bright cheerfulness that never seemed to desert her. But the returned traveller had only to glance at the eyes of her friend to learn that she was not feeling so very bright or so very cheerful. She surprised that look of never-say-die she had seen in the eyes of Lady Kidderminster. It was impossible not to respect the pluck of these women.
“Had a good time?”