Master Julian’s mother was smiling so charmingly that it was with some difficulty that Mrs. Halse, who, with the assistance of Miss Newton, had guessed the substance of the conversation which had actually taken place between the mother and son in the railway carriage during their journey from Norfolk, had some slight difficulty in restraining the ejaculation, “Cat!”
“Really!” was the suave answer. “Miss Newton is really engaged, and so well. So glad! Such a charming girl! Yes, I’ll tell Julian, certainly. His heart will be broken—temporarily. Fortunately his fancies are as ephemeral as they are numerous. Good-bye! So glad to have seen you.”
She pressed Mrs. Halse’s hand cordially as she spoke, and pursued her graceful way to the door.
Julian was dining out again that night, and her lonely evening apparently affected his mother’s nerves. At any rate, Julian received a message the next morning—a Sunday—to the effect that she had slept badly and was resting, but would see him at lunch, and at lunch-time accordingly she appeared.
She laughed at his half-careless, half-affectionate enquiries, calling herself quite rested and quite well. And after his first enquiries as to her health, Julian relapsed into rather moody silence—silence with which his mother had apparently nothing to do. That tone of independence which had come to him, and which was sometimes hardly perceptible, could hardly have been more strongly evidenced than by his one or two spasmodic efforts to pass out of his own life—where something was evidently not to his liking—into the life they shared.
Such a state of things is always more or less disturbing to the mental atmosphere; more or less according to the sensitiveness of the person upon whom it acts; and as Mrs. Romayne sat opposite Julian the furtive glances which she cast at his moody, preoccupied face became more and more anxious and restless. A tentative, uncertain tone in her manner of dealing with him, which had developed during the last month, increased moment by moment; and her voice and laugh as she chatted to him—ignoring his indifferent reception of her little bits of news—became moment by moment more forced and unreal. That her nerves and her self-control were not so reliable as they had once been was evident in the fact that she took refuge—as was not unusual with her in these days—in painful exaggeration.
Her bright little flow of talk stopped at last, however; and Julian making no attempt to fill the gap, there was total silence. It was broken again by Mrs. Romayne, and she was talking now, evidently, for talking’s sake, as though she was no longer capable of weighing her words; but, in her intense desire to penetrate the vague atmosphere which she could not challenge, was making her advances blindly.
“I met Mrs. Halse yesterday,” she began gaily. “Did I tell you? Fortunately I only encountered her for a few moments, or I doubt whether I should be alive to tell the tale.”
She paused, and Julian smiled absently. They had finished lunch, and he had risen and strolled to the fire with a cigarette, and he was thinking vaguely, as her voice broke in upon his meditations—or perhaps rather feeling than thinking—that his mother was rather artificial. All society women were artificial, he had thought once or twice lately; and the word was acquiring a new significance to him.
“She bestowed an immense amount of conversation upon me in the course of those few minutes!” continued Mrs. Romayne in the sprightly tone which her son was beginning to hear for the first time as something jarring. “Amongst other things she told me a little piece of news which will interest you.”