“It’s an extremely unfortunate situation. I would be prepared to give you every support, Cecily, if I believed that Dick had misbehaved himself at all. But if you have thrown him over, broken up his home for the sake of a—a theory, it is one of the most cruel and unnecessary things I have ever heard of. Men are men. They demand a little amusement. If you refuse to allow him that you must expect——”
“Please, Mrs. Harrison. There’s nothing to be gained by all this, surely.”
The little woman drove off, her angry, alert little head looking straight ahead through the window of her limousine.
“Didn’t Grandmother Harrison bring me anything?” asked Dorothea, running in a little too late to speak to her grandmother.
“Not to-day, dear. She was in a hurry.”
“She nearly always does,” said Dorothea, with some disappointment.
Cecily regarded her daughter with some worry as she climbed up to see if she could catch a glimpse of the departing car from the window. She often wondered how she was going to explain all this to the children. Would they understand or would they, like Della, blame her, or, like Mrs. Harrison and her father, think she was foolish?
“But I didn’t do it,” she protested to herself. “It was Dick who insisted. I couldn’t keep him from going. Unless I was willing to throw everything in life which seems worth while to me into the discard. Everything that is worth while to anybody. The standards of life that must be maintained.” She thought of Della, a mass of provocative lingerie. She did not want this sturdy little figure in blue linen to grow up to be like that. If one had to give up everything to prevent Dorothea’s becoming like that, it was worth it. The extravagance of her conclusions did not strike her as false just then. She topped her sacrifice with some self-glorification, and taking Dorothea out into the garden, played with her until dinner time.
But in the empty evening she found the self-glory fading. She was alone. She had failed.