"I too am a mother! I too!" she said. She hurried after George and clung to his arm as they went home.
"Was there any letter?" she asked.
"Only one from Munich—Miss Vance. I haven't opened it."
"I thought your mother would write. She must have heard about the boy!"
George's face grew dark. "No, she'll not write. Nor come."
"You wish for her every day, George?" She looked at him wistfully.
"Yes, I do. She and I were comrades to a queer degree. I long for something hearty and homelike again. See here, Lisa. I'm going home before my boy begins to talk. I mean he shall grow up under wholesome American influences—not foreign."
"Not foreign," she repeated gravely. She was silent a while. "I have thought much of it all lately," she said at last. "It will be wholesome for Jacques on your farm. Horses—dogs—— Your mother will love him. She can't help it. She—I acted like a beast to that woman, George. I'll say that. She hit me hard. But she has good traits. She is not unlike my own mother."
George said nothing. God forbid that he should tell her, even by a look, that she and her mother were of a caste different from his own.
But he was bored to the soul by the difference; he was tired of her ignorances, which she showed every minute, of her ghastly, unclean knowledges—which she never showed.