Ellen, sitting now with her head bowed as if she had been accused, said, “I know.... I know that.”
“I know my own son ...” repeated Mrs. Callendar gravely. “I know him well. We are very different in some ways ... but I know him.” Here she paused for a moment and stirred her coffee with the tiny silver spoon. “I’ve seen him when he fancied he was in love with a woman.” She raised one plump hand and the soiled diamonds glittered darkly. “Oh, this has not been the first time. It has happened before. But this time there is a difference.” She coughed and added, “This time instead of pursuing the object, he has run away from her.... That makes it serious.”
Ellen, mute and frightened by the frankness of the older woman, sat awkwardly, like a little girl, regarding her. Surely she had never heard any one talk in quite this fashion ... so honestly and yet so calmly. In a moment like this she had expected anger, even denunciation; she had prepared herself for it.
“I don’t know what is to be done about it ...” continued Mrs. Callendar, “because I don’t know everything.... In a case like this, one must know everything in order to make sense. You have done something to him. I don’t blame you.... It is simply one of those things which happens.... I fancy if you had not met each other as you did, you would have met in some other fashion....” Her green eyes narrowed and her lips contracted so that all her plumpness appeared to shrivel and vanish. She seemed suddenly to become vastly old and wizened. “Yes, I am sure you would have met. Nothing could have kept you apart.” And then, plump and kindly once more, she said, “I don’t know what it is you have done to him. I don’t fancy he knows himself, but he’s miserable.... You see, the trouble is that he is really romantic ... just as I am romantic ... and he’s always pretended he was an experienced, cynical homme du monde.... In that one thing he is dishonest.”
She reached over and in an unexpected gesture touched the hand of the girl so that Ellen, taken unaware by this movement of sympathy, began to cry softly.
“I am romantic,” said Mrs. Callendar softly, “though you might not believe it. Listen!” She leaned forward. “Listen! I’ll tell you a story about myself and you’ll see. You’ll understand then perhaps that I have sympathy enough to be of use in this matter ... because in a time of this sort, it’s sympathy that’s needed more than anything else.”
And then she settled back and between puffs on her cigarette related bit by bit, from the very beginning, the romantic story of her elopement with Richard Callendar’s father. She told the story with an Oriental sense of color, and slowly before the eyes of the girl she recreated the color of Constantinople in her youth, all the magic of the summer palace and the Bosphorus by moonlight, all the desolation of the Greek aunts, all the crafty manner of the rich old Dikran Leopopulos, and above all the somber glow of the love she had known for the blond and handsome young American. Under the spell of her own tale she began to speak half in French, half in English, but Ellen, listening, became so caught up in the magic of the story that she understood it all, even those things which Thérèse Callendar related in an alien tongue. The tale set fire to a vein of warmth in the girl which until now had gone undiscovered, save only at times when, lost in her music, it had emerged translated into a beauty of sound. For the moment even the plump Greek woman herself appeared no longer to be old and ugly and covered with diamonds in need of cleaning. In the fervor of her story, she attained for a passing instant the quality of youth and of a fleeting beauty out of the Levant.
And when she had finished, she leaned back and said, with a wicked chuckle, “Voyez. I am ugly now and fat. But I was not then.” Then she sighed quickly and looked down at her rings. “You see the thing is that he died ... he was drowned before we had been married two years.”
Again Ellen kept silent. There was nothing for her to say that would not have been trivial and idiotic. She waited and presently Thérèse said, “You see, I can understand.... I wanted you to know that.... One would have said that he and I were separated by a thousand things. None of them made the least difference.”
It was Ellen who in the end interrupted the strange, breathless silence which enveloped them at the conclusion of Thérèse’s story. She murmured, “It was nothing that I meant to do.... It happened.... I don’t know how.... It happened without either of us saying anything. It was,” (she groped for the words and collapsed into banality), “It was like a flash of lightning.”