“What do you take me for? I’ve nearly died of—well, call it interest, more times than I can count up. No little boy likes to have no mother; likes to have his mother care nothing for him. But I’ve grown perfectly used to it. And I know—I know now, mind you—that you don’t care. Well, it may not be what I should have chosen, but at least it lets me out. It’s too late, now, to make me care.”
It was by no means the whole truth. But it was what he had been trying, and in vain, to say to himself an hour since about it all. There was some triumph in being able to say it now to her.
Her blue eyes turned on him a stranger’s sudden kindness. “Were those years bad, Peter? I thought they’d be less bad if you began them very young. You see, they had to begin some time.”
“Oh, they began—and they lasted. Now, they’re not bad at all. So why rake it all up now?”
If she had been little and old and shaking, he couldn’t have pressed the question, he knew. The powdered cheeks, the elaborate hair, the vermilion lips gave him a kind of sanction. There was a pitiful way of wearing rouge, no doubt; this wasn’t pitiful in the least. He didn’t know what she looked like underneath the mask, but he could almost have sworn she didn’t need it.
“I’m not trying to do that. If I’ve come so late, it’s because I feel quite sure that it’s too late to undo any of it. I am not trying”—her brilliant, dyed smile was extraordinarily little in the maternal tradition—“to get a single claw into you. I’ve come to pay damages, Peter, not to claim them. But you must be very, very, very polite to me. I’m not used to anything else. And America rather frightens me.”
“I don’t want to be anything but polite,” murmured Peter, abashed. “And the freer you really are, the more it’s up to you to play the game, don’t you think?”
She smiled vaguely, and he saw at once that she belonged to the generation that preceded slangy paradox. She might almost have worn a fluffy gray shawl.
“I am sure you don’t wish to be anything but polite,” she brought out, still vaguely. “But—I’ve odd things to say, and I’ve come a long way to say them; and you, my son, must listen.”
“It’s what I’m here for.”