"Blind as a bat, you are!" she said. "Despite all your supposed wisdom. On general principles your mother wanted you to marry, of course, because that is the proper thing for a man to do. But marriage in the abstract and marriage in the concrete are two very different matters. There! haven't I put that well? Those are lawyers' terms, aren't they? They sound learned, anyway."
He smiled in an absent-minded way at her folly. His thoughts were elsewhere. Something in the turn of her sentence had carried him suddenly back to a moon-lighted evening in which he had walked and talked with Alice Warder, and he could seem to hear her voice again as she said:—
"I know your mother loves me, Erskine, almost as she would a daughter; and I also know that she loves me a great deal better because her son is like a brother to me instead of being—something else." He remembered how he had puzzled over it all, and studied his mother's face, and half decided that Alice was right. Was Irene right, also? Was his mother grieved that he had married at all? Was it possible that she could have stooped to so small a feeling as jealousy!
His wife laid her head caressingly against his arm and said softly:—
"Don't worry about it, Erskine. We can't either of us help it now; and we must just make the best of it and do as well as we can."
For the first time in his life, as those low tremulously spoken words sounded in his ears, a feeling very like resentment toward his mother swelled in Erskine Burnham's heart, and a torrent of tenderness rushed over him toward the wife who had no one in all the world but himself. This was what she had often told him.
All things considered it is perhaps not strange that he did not visit his mother's room that evening.
It is true that when they went upstairs he paused before her door and listened, and told himself that she was asleep and he would not disturb her. But there had been nights before, many of them, in which he had waited at her door and listened, and murmured: "Mommie," and received a prompt invitation to enter. On this evening, though the hour was not late, he was not insistent. He made no attempt to knock or to speak. It was his concession to that new thought about her being an old woman. Or was it a slight concession, unawares, to that new feeling of resentment?
His mother, knowing nothing of what had been talked over in the moonlight, held her breath and waited. Of course Erskine would come to say good night. She forgot that she had wished he would not come! When his footsteps moved toward his own room, she waited a minute, then stepped into the hall.
"Erskine!" she said; but she said it very softly and he did not hear her. She could hear his voice. He was talking with his wife. The mother slipped softly back to her own room and locked her door. It was not late, and she and her son were only across a hall from each other; yet, for the first time in her life under like conditions, if she slept at all it must be without his good-night kiss. There is no true mother but will appreciate the situation. There are, it is true, mothers who are not accustomed to good-night kisses from their grown sons, and so would not miss them, but they are accustomed to a certain atmosphere, and they can understand what it would be like to be suddenly removed from it.