Have just written Tip Elder how sorry I am about Sue, but that he'd better give it up. She'll never marry. How curiously we three are twisted into the Bradley weaving!
M. so happy and beautiful—the past seems a dream. Voice lovely still, but not quite under her control always, and a tiny roughness in it that humanises, somehow—it was too clear before, though that sounds absurd.
Everybody wondering how everybody else will take her retirement. Strangely enough, no one regrets much, personally, but all sure the others will! Are we all more clear-sighted than we suppose—or more sentimental? Surgeon from Vienna has pronounced condition final. Either she is a wonderful actress or else we have overestimated her vocation; she seems absolutely contented. And yet, think of her triumphs! And of course, her greatest successes were all to come. Madame M—— is furious, but told Sue she had never trusted Roger—he was always too silent! "He has absorbed a great artist like so much blotting-paper!" she said. But he has got something into her eyes that Madame never saw there: we all agree on that. How did Alif put it—"Tis Allah sets the price, brother—we have but to pay." Well, she's paid. And old Roger, for that matter, and Sue, and Tip—and I. Who keeps the shop, I wonder?
CHAPTER XXXII
THE SUNSET END
To-day I went to Mary's wedding, and it has made me very thoughtful. She was very lovely—a great, blooming blonde, the image of Roger. They were a fine pair, as he held her on his arm: he looking younger than his sixty years, she older than her twenty, for all the children are wonderfully mature and well-developed.
She was nearly as tall as young Paynter, whose slenderness, however, is like steel. I well remember when Dr. McGee took him to North Carolina and made him over—a weak, irritable little precocity of twelve or so. He never ate or slept in a house for three years, and I think that the birds and trees of that period got into his opera and made it what it is, the musical event of a decade. He works best in Paris, and they will live there, after a honeymoon on the Island.