“She’s pretty sick, my boy. You’ll find her changed a good deal. You’ll pretend not to notice, of course. She’s proud, you know.”
Then the grisled colonel, who had grown patient with so much that was terrible, looked at his father as he had looked sometimes when he woke from bad dreams, screaming “Mamma! Papa!”
He turned his frightened eyes away from what he saw in his father’s eyes.
Quietly, since it was an old, old story to him, RoBards told him the truth, and Keith wrung his hands to keep from startling the passengers in the crowded car with the mad gestures of protest he would else have flung out.
He wanted to charge the clouds and battle in his mother’s behalf.
But when he entered her room he was as brave and calm as at a dress parade. He smiled and caressed and spoke flatteries that cut his throat and burned his lips.
He hurried back to disband his regiment, then brought Frances and his son up to Tuliptree with him, and established himself in the nearest room to his mother’s. He tucked her in and babied her as she had babied him when she was younger than he was now.
Patty’s famous hair was her only remaining pride, the inheritance from the Patty Jessamine who had combed and brushed and coiled it and wrapped it in strange designs about her little head.
She was always fondling it as if it were a fairy turban, a scarf of strange silk. Even in her bitterest paroxysms she would not tear at her hair.
The nurse would braid it and draw two long cables down her shoulders and praise it, and Patty would not brag a little, saying: