“She had to make up for a lot,” she sighed.
An hour or more after dinner Mrs. Randall stopped Linda in the hall beyond the music. “Mama out?” she inquired brightly. “I thought Mr. Jasper left this morning?”
Linda told her that Mr. Jasper had gone; she added nothing else.
“I must look at the register,” Mrs. Randall continued; “I really must.”
Obeying an uncontrollable impulse Linda half cried, “I'd like to see you riding on a leopard!” A flood of misery enveloped her, and she hurried up to the silence of her mother's deserted room.
V
It was on her fourteenth birthday that Linda noticed a decided change in her mother; a change, unfortunately, that most of all affected the celebrated good humors. In the first place Mrs. Condon spent an increasingly large part of the day before the mirror of her dressing-table, but without any proportionate pleasure; or, if there was a proportion kept, it exhibited the negative result of a growing annoyance. “God knows why they all show at once,” she exclaimed discontentedly, seated—as customary—before the eminently truthful reflection of a newly discovered set of lines. “I'm not old enough to begin to look like a hag.”
“Oh, mother,” Linda protested, shocked, “you mustn't say such horrid things about yourself. Why, you're perfectly lovely, and you don't seem a speck older than you did years ago.”