Vere looked a little doubtful—even, for a moment, slightly confused.
“N—o?” she said.
She seemed to consider something. Then she added:
“But I think it depends. If something in us might give pain to any one we love, I think we ought to try to hide that. I am sure we ought.”
Hermione felt that each of them was thinking of the same thing, even speaking of it without mentioning it. But whereas she knew that Vere was doing so, Vere could not know that she was. So Vere was at a disadvantage. Vere’s last words had opened the mother’s eyes. What she had guessed was true. This secret of the poems was kept from her because of her own attempt to create and its failure. Abruptly she wondered if Vere and Emile had ever talked that failure over. At the mere thought of such a conversation her whole body tingled. She got up from her chair.
“Well, good-night, Vere,” she said.
And she left the room, leaving her child amazed.
Vere did not understand why her mother had come, nor why, having come, she abruptly went away. There was something the matter with her mother. She had felt that for some time. She was more conscious than ever of it now. Around her mother there was an atmosphere of uneasiness in which she felt herself involved. And she was vaguely conscious of the new distance between them, a distance daily growing wider. Now and then, lately, she had felt almost uncomfortable with her mother, in the sitting-room when she was saying good-night, and just now when she sat on the bed. Youth is terribly quick to feel hostility, however subtle. The thought that her mother could be hostile to her had never entered Vere’s head. Nevertheless, the mother’s faint and creeping hostility—for at times Hermione’s feeling was really that, thought she would doubtless have denied it even to herself—disagreeably affected the child.
“What can be the matter with Madre?” she thought.
She went over to the writing-table, where she had hastily shut up her poems on hearing the knock at the door, but she did not take them out again. Instead she sat down and wrote the note to Monsieur Emile. As she wrote the sense of mystery, of uneasiness, departed from her, chased away, perhaps, by the memory of Monsieur Emile’s kindness to her and warm encouragement, by the thought of having a long talk with him again, of showing him certain corrections and developments carried out by her since she had seen him. The sympathy of the big man meant a great deal to her, more even than he was aware of. It lifted up her eager young heart. It sent the blood coursing through her veins with a new and ardent strength. Hermione’s enthusiasm had been inherited by Vere, and with it something else that gave it a peculiar vitality, a power of lasting—the secret consciousness of talent.