The following summer saw the club-house and all its affiliations in working order. The beneficiaries took to it most kindly, but were disposed to manage it in their own way: not in all respects the way of the founder's intention.
“To make a gift complete, you must keep yourself out of it,” Mrs. Bogardus advised. “You have done your part; now let them have it and run it themselves.”
Paul was not hungry for leadership, but he had hoped that his interest in the men's amusements would bring him closer to them and equalize the difference between the Hill and the quarry.
“You have never worked with them; how can you expect to play with them?” was another of his mother's cool aphorisms. Alas! Paul, the son of the poor man, had no work, and hence no play.
It was time to be making winter plans again. Mrs. Bogardus knew that her son's young family was now complete without her presence. Moya had gained confidence in the care of her child; she no longer brought every new symptom to the grandmother. Yet Mrs. Bogardus put off discussing the change, dreading to expose her own isolation, a point on which she was as sensitive as if it were a crime. Paul was never entirely frank with her: she knew he would not be frank in this. They never expressed their wills or their won'ts to each other with the careless rudeness of a sound family faith, and always she felt the burden of his unrelenting pity. She began to take long drives alone, coming in late and excusing herself for dinner. At such times she would send for her grandson in his nurse's arms to bid him good-night. The mother would put off her own good-night, not to intrude at these sessions. One evening, going up later to kiss her little son, she found his crib empty, the nurse gone to her dinner. He was fast asleep in his grandmother's arms, where she had held him for an hour in front of the open fire in her bedroom. She looked up guiltily. “He was so comfortable! And his crib is cold. Will he take cold when Ellen puts him back?”
“I am sure he won't,” Moya whispered, gathering up the rosy sleeper. But she was disturbed by the breach of bedtime rules.
In the drawing-room a few nights later she said energetically to Paul.
“One might as well be dead as to live with a grudge.”
“A good grudge?”
“There are no good grudges.”