Mrs. Travis sat back in her chair with a faint rustling of silk and a creaking of stays. She said “Oh!” in a funny little voice, fidgeted her hands once or twice on the table, and then folded them over the garment upon her lap. She was not really thick-skinned. If people differed or found fault with her, she suffered severely, until she had time to see that her own view was the right one. She never admitted herself in the wrong. There was no credit due to her for that, she had simply never learned how. Things might seem against her—in fact, they frequently did—but she was always inwardly convinced that she was in the right. If it had appeared to her that the world was flat, she would have admitted the imparted knowledge that it was round, with a complacent “Yes—it may be so,” but she would have known it to be flat all the same.
She had a queer method of argument too. She would admit everything with a tentative “Yes,” propose some remedy that wildly exceeded necessity; and when this was rejected she would fall back upon things as they were. She had a really fine turn of obstinacy, bone-obstinacy. As to the after effect upon her of argument, there was none.
A short and significant silence followed, while her skin hardened.
“You know I haven’t got any money,” she began at last in a smoothly injured voice. “I can’t bear owing anything. I wasn’t brought up to it, and I can’t do it.” Her green eyes seemed to deprecate the possibility of disbelief, but there was nothing except the back of Jocelyn’s head to deprecate, as she leant forward in her chair, and gazed at the fire with moody eyes.
The flames licked the logs, and an occasional red spark darted forth, trying to reach her outstretched feet. The kitten purred softly. Jocelyn’s silence was discomfiting to Mrs. Travis; her eloquence felt faint for lack of contradiction. She began to fan herself slowly with a newspaper and to get a little red.
“You should think more of other people,” she began again. “You know I can’t afford to go abroad. That horrid place has ruined me. I’ve never had any money, to spare, since.” When Mrs. Travis lost all her money, her Puritan education enabled her to see that gambling was immoral—until she had some more. Just now she had some more, but not quite enough—a tight place for her principles.
“It’s not like it used to be there. They try to get everything they can out of one. I don’t think it’s right.” These words with her conveyed the acme of disapproval. She began to enlarge upon the possibility of corrupt croupiers, weighted tables, pre-arranged cards—devices with refutation writ large upon their faces—but very dear to her. She pouted her lips as she spoke, her hands moved restlessly, and her green eyes kept glancing from the back of Jocelyn’s head to her own lap—signs that she was agitated. She ended by declaring with decision that she would never go near the place again.
“I am glad of that,” said Jocelyn quietly. She frowned, as she gazed at the dull glow playing fitfully on the charring logs. There was a minute or two of silence. A hundred memories were thronging in the girl’s mind, ghosts of long hours when the sun had blazed, mocking the torment of her spirit, when the star-flecked vault of the heavens had looked down, cold and pitiless, upon her shame and misery. She put her hands over her face.
Presently there came a sudden, uneasy creak from the chair where Mrs. Travis was sitting—one would not have ventured to predict its meaning—and she began to speak.
“You’ve not been looking very well lately, my dear,” she said with a little tentative cough. “I think perhaps we ought to go south for Easter. ‘Monte’ is nice, then, just for a week.”