So she brooded: a child!
"If I could only get him, it wouldn't be 'just us'!" ... "A boy's clothes are not as pretty as a girl's, but a little rough suit would be awfully attractive.... I'd give him music lessons.... We could go out to our field in June. And he would take off his shoes and stockings and wade!" How foolish Edith's grown-up childishness of wading looked, compared to the scene which she visualized—a little, handsome boy, standing in the shallow rippling water, bareheaded, probably; the sunshine sifting down through the locust blossoms and touching that thatch of yellow hair, and glinting into those blue eyes. "He would call me 'Mamma'!" Then she hummed to herself, "'O Spring!' Oh, I must have him!" Her hope became such an obsession that its irrationality did not strike her. It was so in her mind that she even spoke of it once to Mrs. Houghton. "I know you know?" she said; "Maurice told me he told you."
Mary Houghton said, hesitatingly, "I think I know what you mean."
This was in March. Mrs. Houghton and Edith were in town for a few days' shopping, and of course they meant to see Eleanor. "I'll go to the dressmaker's," Edith had told her mother, "and then I'll corral Maurice, and we'll drop in on Mrs. Newbolt, and then I'll meet you at Eleanor's. I don't hanker for a long call on Eleanor." Edith's gayly candid face hardened.
So it was that Mrs. Houghton had arrived ahead of her girl, and the two older women were alone before a little smoldering fire in the library. Eleanor had left her tea tray to go across the room and give little helpless Bingo a lump of sugar. "He only eats what I give him," she said; "dear old Bingo! I think he actually suffers, he's so jealous." Then, pouring Mrs. Houghton's tea, she suddenly spoke: "I know you—know?" When Mary Houghton said, gravely, yes, she "knew," Eleanor said, "Oh, Mrs. Houghton, Maurice and I are nearer to each other than we ever were before!"
"That's as it should be. And as I knew it would be, too. You've done a noble thing, Eleanor."
"No! No! Don't say that! It was nothing. Because I—love him so. And he never cared for that woman. She has no brains, he says. But what I want is to get the boy for him. Oh, he must have the boy!" Then she told Mrs. Houghton how Maurice went to see the child. "He goes once a week, though he says she's jealous if he makes too many suggestions; so he has to be very careful or she would get angry. But he has managed it so I have seen him; last summer he took him to the circus, and I sat near them. And twice he's had him in the park and I spoke to him. And on Christmas he took him to the movies; I sat beside him. And I buttoned his coat when he went out!" Her eyes were rapt.
Mary Houghton, listening, said to herself, "Now what will Henry Houghton say about the 'explosion'? I shall rub it into him when I get home!" ... "Eleanor, you are magnificent!" she said.
"But how could I do anything else—if I loved Maurice?" Eleanor said. "Oh, I do want him to have Jacky! We must make a man of him. It would be wicked to let Lily ruin him! And I want to give him music lessons. He has Maurice's blue eyes."
It was infinitely pathetic, this woman with gray hair, telling of her young husband's joy in his little son—who was not hers. And Eleanor's sense of the paramount importance of the child gave Mrs. Houghton a new and real respect for her. Aloud, she agreed heartily with the statement that Jacky must be saved from Lily.