“The young lady, mum,” said the woman, as, in answer to a nonchalant, “Come in,” she turned the knob, and, letting a strong odor of Turkish cigarettes stream out into the passage, thrust open the door, “the young lady, mum, and I’m a-showin’ of ’er straight in like you asked.”
Dora waited for nothing more.
“Mother!” she said, with a little throb in her voice as she pressed past the landlady and entered the room, shutting the door behind her.
It seemed so holy, this meeting for the first time since infancy with the mother who had borne her! “It is I; it is Dora; it is——”
Here she stopped. The room was full of smoke, and through the dense aromatic cloud, she saw a figure curled up in a deep armchair beside a table littered with papers, magazines, and cigarette ashes—a figure clad in a beautiful lace tea gown, and with a lovely, alluring face framed in a loose mass of disheveled wine-gold hair.
“Oh! I beg your pardon,” said Dora, coloring and instinctively fumbling for the knob of the door. “Such an absurd mistake. Pray forgive me; the fault was not mine. I expected to find my mother here.”
“Well, so you have done. If you are Dora—and what an absurdly big creature you have grown! I am your mother.”
“You? Absurd! Oh, pardon me, I don’t mean to be rude, but really this is too silly. You can’t be more than a year or two older than I am myself—and I am nearly eighteen years of age.”
“Nearly sixteen, please; I’ve told Dante that, and we may as well stick to it. It’s bad enough to have to confess that I’m old enough to have a daughter nearly sixteen, without adding two years to it, for the sake of truth. What in the world has made you grow like this? Of course, I know that your father was tall, but if I had thought that you were as big and as old-looking as you are, I don’t believe I should had have courage enough to send to that Skimmers woman for you—although I don’t know; it’s worth something to have a dig at your aunt! What are you staring at me like this for? For pity’s sake, sit down. Why didn’t you get a new dress? I sent money for you to do so. But perhaps the Skimmers woman didn’t give it to you? Did she? Why don’t you answer? I hate people who stare and say nothing. Sit down and talk to me, for goodness’ sake. I haven’t much time to waste with you, anyway; I’ve got to be off to the theater in a few minutes. I’m opening the new opera house to-night, you know—or, perhaps, you don’t know! But the town is well billed, and if you have any eyes at all you must have seen my name on the boardings.”
Dora drew back with a sudden influx of memory and with a shuddering sense of repulsion. “Oh, you don’t mean—you can’t mean that you—you are that woman? And that you are my mother as well?”