Ellen looked at her squarely.
“Mr. Harrison telephoned that he was leaving town and would like to see the children. So I took them down to the train.”
A flush came over Cecily’s face.
“You took them to the train without my permission?”
“Their father telephoned me that he would like me to,” answered Ellen, continuing to take off Dorothea’s wraps in the utmost calmness.
There was something in Ellen’s assumption which it was impossible to circumvent. There was no answer. He was their father; he had asked to see them; she had no right to prevent it; the thoughts skimmed through Cecily’s mind, disturbed as she was. She said nothing further. Dorothea was full of embarrassing comments on her father that Cecily did not want to hear, but it was impossible to divert her. For several days Dorothea was determined to talk of her father and could not be thrown off the track. It seemed to Cecily that it would be outrageous to forbid her such talk, but she did not like it.
She had come to see the difficulties of continuing in her present relations with Dick. It could hardly go on. Some arrangement would have to be made to clear up the vagueness of the situation. She was disagreeably conscious of the lurking feeling among her relatives that Dick and she would “make it up,” and that, she felt angrily, made her position intolerably cheap. It wasn’t a thing which could be “made up.” In those moments when she did toss over in her restless mind the possibilities of living with Dick again, the thought of the smiles of people over the “reconciliation” was intensely irritating. Della had tried to urge her to take some step to see Dick, but gentle as she was with Della these days, Cecily would not allow her to go on.
Yet she was learning from Della. Learning the strangest things from Della’s pragmatic little soul. Walter was always asking her to come to see them, to join them here and there and it was so good to be wanted that Cecily saw the young Warners often. At first the demonstrations of affection she used to witness bothered her, shamed her delicacies. But she grew used to them and quite tolerant. One couldn’t do away with Dellas. Why shouldn’t she kiss her husband in public if she liked? What difference did it make? They cared for each other and when Della would pout and grow angry and Walter get angry in return, Cecily grew used to seeing them, for no reason at all, give up the quarrel in favor of a caress. No long silences, no quiet bitternesses. No one made his point in these little quarrels, but what did that matter either? They weren’t points worth making.
Cecily had noted through the papers the return of Fliss for those few days. It had been evidently quite a social triumph. The entertaining for her had been very quiet in deference to Fliss’s mourning. Cecily heard that with a quick, ironic memory of the day she had visited Fliss’s mother.
Once she spoke of Fliss to Ellen.