The Desert and the Sown

by Mary Hallock Foote

Moya's eyes narrowed reflectively.

“How constantly you are thinking of this! I think of it only when I am with you. As if a woman like your mother, who has done one thing, should be all that thing, and nothing more to us, her children!”

Moya was giving herself up, almost immorally, Paul sometimes thought, to the fascination Mrs. Bogardus's personality had for her. In a keenly susceptible state herself, at that time, there was something calming and strengthening in the older woman's perfected beauty, her physical poise, and the fitness of everything she did and said and wore to the given occasion. As a dark woman she was particularly striking in summer clothing. Her white effects were tremendous. She did not pretend to study these matters herself, but in years of experience, with money to spend, she had learned well in whom to confide. When women are shut up together in country houses for the summer, they can irritate each other in the most foolish ways. Mrs. Bogardus never got upon your nerves.

But, for Paul, there was a poison in his mother's beauty, a dread in her influence over his impressionable young wife, thrilled with the awakening forces of her consonant being. Moya would drink deep of every cup that life presented. Motherhood was her lesson for the day. “She is a queen of mothers!” she would exclaim with an abandon that was painful to Paul; he saw deformity where Moya was ready to kneel. “I love her perfect love for you—for me, even! She is above all jealousy. She doesn't even ask to be understood.”

Paul was silent.

“And oh, she knows, she knows! She has been through it all—in such despair and misery—all that is before me, with everything in the world to make it easy and all the beautiful care she gives me. She is the supreme mother. And I never had a mother to speak to before. Don't, don't, please, keep putting that dreadful thing between us now!”

So Paul took the dreadful thing away with him and was alone with it, and knew that his mother saw it in his eyes when their eyes met and avoided. When, after a brief household absence, he would see her again he wondered, “Has she been alone with it? Has it passed into another phase?”—as of an incurable disease that must take its time and course.

Mrs. Bogardus did not spare her conscience in social ways all this time. It was a part of her life to remember that she had neighbors—certain neighbors. She included Paul without particularly consulting him whenever it was proper for him to support her in her introduction of his wife to the country-house folk, many of whom they knew in town.

All his mother's friends liked Paul and supposed him to be very clever, but they had never taken him seriously. “Now, at last,” they said, “he has done something like other people. He is coming out.” Experienced matrons were pleased to flatter him on his choice of a bride. The daughters studied Moya, and decided that she was “different,” but “all right.” She had a careless distinction of her own. Some of her “things” were surprisingly lovely—probably heirlooms; and army women are so clever about clothes.

Would they spend the winter in town?