“Horrid woman!” she said to herself. “Patronises me! Well, she will talk about nothing but Julian all this evening, wherever she may be—and she goes everywhere—so perhaps it has been worth while to endure her.” Then, as Julian appeared again, she said gaily: “My dear boy, they’ve been here an hour, and we shall both be late for dinner! Be off with you and dress!”
It was a very cosy little dinner that followed. Mrs. Romayne, as carefully dressed for her son as she could have been for the most critical stranger, was also at her brightest and most responsive. They talked for the most part of people and their doings; society gossip. Mrs. Romayne told Julian all about Mrs. Halse’s bazaar; deriding the whole affair as an excuse for deriding its promoter, but with no realisation of its innate absurdity; and giving Julian to understand, at the same time, that it was “the thing” to be in it; an idea which he was evidently quite capable of appreciating. Dinner over, she drew his arm playfully through hers and took him all over the house.
“Let me see that you approve!” she said with a laughing assumption of burlesque suspense.
The last room into which she took him was the little room at the back of the dining-room; and as his previous tone of appreciation and pleasure developed into genuine boyish exclamations of delight at the sight of it, the instant’s intense satisfaction in her face struck oddly on her manner.
“You like it, my lord?” she said. “My disgraceful extravagance is rewarded by your gracious approval? Then your ridiculous mother is silly enough to be pleased.” She gave him a little careless touch, half shake and half caress, and Julian threw his arm round her rapturously.
“I should think I did like it!” he said boyishly. “I say, shan’t I have to work hard here! Mother, what an awfully jolly smoking table!”
“Suppose you smoke here now,” suggested Mrs. Romayne, “by way of taking possession? Oh, yes! I’ll stay with you.”
She sat down, as she spoke, in one of the low basket-chairs by the fire, taking a little hand-screen from the mantelpiece as she did so. And Julian, with an exclamation of supreme satisfaction, threw himself into a long lounging-chair with an air of general proprietorship which sat oddly on his youthful figure; and proceeded to select and light a cigar.
A silence followed—rather a long silence. Julian lay back in his chair, and smoked in luxurious contentment. Mrs. Romayne sat with her dainty head, with its elaborate arrangement of red-brown hair, resting against a cushion, her face half hidden by the shade thrown by the fire-screen as she held it up in one slender, ringed hand. She seemed to be looking straight into the fire; as a matter of fact her eyes were fixed on the boyish face beside her. She was the first to break silence.
“It is two, nearly three, months since we were together,” she said.