Mabel, almost too surprised to reply, managed to mumble that she supposed her mother had been pretty busy bringing up her brother Frank and herself.
"Well, I suppose she feels that she is really free now," said the lady with a smile, "since you are starting out for yourself. Although," she added, "I think your mother is very brave to let you start out of the nest so soon. You seem such a young girl to be off by yourself. Of course it is not at all my affair, but I should think that you would hate to be away from such a talented mother as yours."
As Mabel recalled this conversation, she saw her mother in a new light and somehow the new light blazed almost too strongly on Mabel herself. She felt strangely small. She had this disagreeable dwindling sensation more and more as she compared her mother with other women in professional and business and social circles, the three great groups that made their influence strongly felt throughout the city.
Mabel found too that her Great Experiment, instead of bringing her the envy and admiration of her mates, seemed in some strange way to make her the object of a kind of scorn that was very hard to bear. The very girls who had applauded her most loudly at first showed her in unmistakable small ways that she was doing something foolish instead of something brave and grand. But Mabel would not give in. She was not brave enough.
It was an endless Sunday. She did not go to church, no one came to see her, and she would not go for her usual afternoon walk. Several times she started for the phone, intending to call Rosanna or Helen, then decided against it. Finally she took up the long neglected Girl Scout Manual and read steadily as far as the page that had caught Claire's attention.
"Loyalty." The word stood out black and threatening on the page. "Loyalty to father and mother." Was she loyal to her talented mother, the mother who had laid aside all her gifts in order to give all her time and strength to her two children? Wasn't it her place now to lighten some of her mother's household cares and make it possible for her to gain the reward she deserved?
Mabel, like Claire, threw the book angrily away from her. But unlike Claire, she could not throw her thoughts away. She was very unhappy.
CHAPTER VIII
The following morning, however, Mabel was once more filled with her usual self-esteem. Before going to sleep she had written a poem which would have sounded more original if it had not been so very like several well-known bits of verse she had often read. But to Mabel it seemed to spring from her soul, and after reading it with tears of appreciation in her eyes, she decided to let the Times-Leader have the privilege of printing it.