Mrs. Pollard’s hands fluttered up to her forehead.
“Do I ever know? Modern mothers aren’t taken into their daughters’ confidence. They come and go as they please, and resent all questioning. It wasn’t so in my young days.”
Bertram smiled at the last words. How often he had heard them! How often he and the two girls—rebels three—had laughed at them, years back, as children. His brother Digby, now a “Black and Tan” in Ireland—horrible thought!—had been too young to enjoy the joke.
He lingered on, forgetting Joyce a little, and his dead baby, feeling a boy again with this mother whose love was restful, and all-understanding. They talked of old times, and she wept a little because so much was altering and she felt so much alone, now that Digby, her baby boy, had gone to Ireland in the midst of all that terror.
She made no allusion to Joyce’s share in her loneliness. Joyce did not seem to like her much and kept Bertram away from her more than was quite kind.
Bertram guessed her thoughts.
“When Joyce gets better, we’ll see more of you, mother.”
“That will be nice, dear,” she answered quietly, but not hopefully.
He left her before midnight, and was back again in Holland Street before the Houses of Parliament had finished a long debate on the Irish situation.
He saw by next day’s papers that his father’s speech was reported verbatim, but he didn’t read it.