NEARING THE SEA
It was Sunday evening. Evil-weather threatened. The broad window of top floor rear looked out upon a lowering sky—everywhere gray and thick: turning black beyond the distant hills. An hour ago the Department wagon had rattled away with the body of Mr. Poddle; and with the cheerfully blasphemous directions, the tramp of feet, the jocular comment, as the box was carried down the narrow stair, the last distraction had departed. The boy's mother was left undisturbed to prepare for the crucial moments in the park.
She was now nervously engaged before her looking-glass. All the tools of her trade lay at hand. A momentous problem confronted her. The child must be won back. He must be convinced of her worth. Therefore she must be beautiful. He thought her pretty. She would be pretty. But how impress him? By what appeal? The pathetic? the tenderly winsome? the gay? She would be gay. Marvellous lies occurred to her—a multitude of them: there was no end to her fertility in deception. And she would excite his jealousy. Upon that feeling she would play. She would blow hot; she would blow cold. She would reduce him to agony—the most poignant agony he had ever suffered. Then she would win him.
To this end, acting according to the enlightenment of her kind, she plied her pencil and puffs; and when, at last, she stood before the mirror, new gowned, beautiful after the conventions of her kind, blind to the ghastliness of it, ignorant of the secret of her strength, she had a triumphant consciousness of power.