1
SHE was ready for the picnic. She wore a yellow linen frock and a hat of brown straw, shaped like a poke bonnet and trimmed with a beautiful yellow ribbon. It was Mamma who tied the ribbon in a great bow: the loops fell in the nape of her neck and the ends ran down between her shoulder blades.
‘Lovely young creature,’ said Mamma dispassionately observing her.
Judith had been home more than a week, and Mamma was being charming. She had taken her to London to buy frocks. They had stayed at Jules for a couple of nights, and Mamma had ordered pretty clothes generously from her own dressmaker. She had said at last in her curious, harsh yet beautiful voice, with a shrug of her shoulders, as Judith paraded before her in the fifteenth model:
‘As you see, everything suits that child.’
And the dressmaker had solemnly agreed.
They had been together to a play, and to the opera; and every morning and every night Judith sat on Mamma’s bed and they chatted together with friendly politeness, almost with ease.
She was a woman exquisitely dressed, manicured, powdered and scented. Her face did not age, though the colourless cheeks were now a little hollowed, and the eyes sharper. Her eyes were like blue diamonds, and she had an unkind reddened mouth with long pointed corners. The bones of her face were strong and sharp and delicate, and something in the triangular outline, in the set of the eyes, the expression of the lips, made you think of a cat.
She was elegant in mind as well as in person, capable, quick-witted. Her conversation was acute and well-informed over a wide field,—and men admired and delighted in her. She had always, thought Judith, seemed to move surrounded by men who paid her compliments. She had no women friends that you could remember. She remarked, now and then, how much she disliked women; and Judith had felt herself included in the condemnation. She had never been pleased to have a daughter: only a handsome son would have been any good to her. Her daughter had discerned that far back in a childhood made overwise by adoration of her.
There was scarcely anything about Mamma to remember: nothing but a vague awestruck worshipful identification of her with angels and the Virgin Mary.