They met again within a week. Cecily was walking home from the convent one afternoon, where she sometimes stopped to see Mother Fénelon, and she met Matthew at his very doorstep. Cecily felt curiously well-acquainted with him and was glad when he asked to walk with her. She told him about the convent and how much she liked to stop there for a few minutes to feel again the atmosphere of the cloister.
“And then you go away with your appetite for home whetted?”
“Not because the convent is less attractive than a home in its own way, but they set each other off so stunningly.”
He laughed in great amusement.
“You have a way of making me most confidential,” said Cecily. They had reached the brick walk leading up to her house. “I’d ask you in, but it’s too near dinner time. Some day you must come to dinner with us.”
“Any day.” He went briskly down the street and Cecily forgot him. She was not feeling quite so gay as she had sounded or tried to sound. Strange things seemed to be happening to her. She had recently gone to her stepfather’s house and spent an afternoon in his library looking up important medical words and finding little information. She supposed the things that were happening meant that she was going to have a baby and she was frightened. So she could not tell Dick. She felt terribly ashamed of her own fears. They had talked about it and it had seemed very beautiful and fine in talking. Now when it had to be done—done by her, through her, with these strange processes diagrammed in encyclopedias—it was different. It was very different. It seemed to cut her off from Dick instead of bringing her closer—it absorbed her thoughts. And with the fears went this strange weakness and dizziness, so foreign to her. That was why she had gone to the convent. And there the little white chapel had seemed to ring with the words of the Jesuit priest in his last instruction, “the sacrament which has for its purpose the bringing up of children.” Cecily’s whole soul seemed to rebel. Marriage was not that. Marriage was Dick—Dick to play with, talk with—Dick to make a home for—Dick to love. This other business was not Dick. The chapel helped her not at all.
Mother Fénelon, meeting her as she had done before, had helped. She had stopped and kissed Cecily swiftly on each cheek and asked about Dick and her mother. Mother Fénelon had a way of reconciling the worldly and the divine. Then she looked at Cecily very steadily and asked, “Still afraid, Cecily?”
“A little, Mother.”
“That will pass, my dear. Experience will help you—and prayer to our Blessed Lady.”
That was all, but somehow Cecily felt that the nun understood the whole business and that she was right. She went out into the afternoon toned up a little.