“Do you think you would ever change?”
“No, I don’t think that.”
“Then why not marry? I can’t understand the modern idea of waiting until life is over to marry. It’s good for people to have their youth together—when they can.”
“Well, Hal has done all the planning, and I think it is very sensible. In the first place, he’s going on with his chemistry. He doesn’t want to go into the brokerage office, and you mustn’t tell Uncle yet.”
“I approve of that. Brokerage will do for Robert.”
“It means two more years for him at college. The first of them I shall spend in New York studying. The next I want to spend in Paris, and I want you to come with me, dear. How about it? And then—married in Paris, and the Sorbonne or some German University for Hal. Isn’t that a glorious programme? He really didn’t plan all of it.”
“No, I imagine not,” laughed Mathilda. “He would probably have planned it as I would, by beginning with the end. But I shan’t oppose you. I’ve never opposed you much, Moira, not even when I might have done so with justice. And the reason is that I have always wanted to live to see one completely happy person. I hope you are going to be the one.”
Mathilda concluded with a wistful note.
“Darling,” cried the girl. “How good you have been to me. And I wonder if I am going to be completely happy. I’ll try, and I shan’t be ashamed or modest about it, either. Is that—egotistical?”
A few minutes later as she passed Hal Blaydon’s door on the way to her own, she could not resist the temptation to go in. She had never done that before deliberately, and she felt a little like an intruder. She had a great distaste for the practice of assuming privileges with those one cared for, but she knew he would be pleased if he saw her patting his bed affectionately and looking around at his belongings. As she stopped in front of the untidy book-shelves, she smiled at their incongruous juxtaposition of textbooks, modern novels and classic survivals of adolescence—“This Side of Paradise” between a Latin grammar and a Dictionary of Physics; “Cytherea,” which reminded her just then of many men she knew, alongside of “Plutarch’s Lives.” She reflected that she would probably not sleep very early to-night and had no fresh reading in her bedroom. She quickly pulled out a volume and went to her room.