“You don’t answer, mother,” persisted Philip. “Did you not like Miss Le Breton’s hat? I found it charming.”
“Yes, dear, I did admire it very much,” she answered as she came to the toilet table in quest of hatpins.
“And Miss Le Breton, do you admire her?” demanded Philip.
“Exceedingly,” answered the mother. “I think,” she added, inflicting a wound to save a greater, “I think we shall hear of an engagement between her and Dan soon. Dan is, of course, in love with her, and she seems fond of him.”
Philip had already known and fully realized this, but somehow his mother’s words stung him to the quick.
Why? he asked himself. What difference could it make to him, since he was altogether out of the running?
Miss Le Breton had been kind to him, but if there were no Dan, he felt she would not be one inch nearer to him—Philip. Still, he was free to admire—even to worship at the shrine of Dan’s Madonna at a discreet distance. Even Dan could not object to that!
As for Dan, he had “gone up like a rocket, to come down like a stick,” as he told his sister Isabel.
But Philip knew nothing of this, nor did he for many a day.
Philip got an idea for a new book while he was walking with his mother on the sea-front, and he delighted his mother by talking it out with her—a thing he had never done before.