“Peter!” she said sharply, but the silent form did not even quiver, and she marched upon him with her short, decisive steps and stood looking down at him. It was almost a year since her only son who was likewise her only child had reached the age of twenty-one, and had legally, at least, become a man, but sleeping there in his bright blue pajamas which perfectly matched the enamel of the bed and its very decorative spread, his fair head pillowed on one up-flung arm, he gave decidedly more the effect of fourteen. “And I believe he is fourteen, essentially,” his mother reflected unhappily. She was in the habit of talking learnedly about juvenile delinquents who were, perhaps, chronologically sixteen, biologically twenty, and psychologically only eight, but it was not until this hour of shame and chagrin that she was willing to include her own offspring in that stern classification.
Peter had been a delightful baby, a charming child, and a most disappointing youth. He was—or he was considered to be—more delightful and more charming than ever, but his parent found him purposeless and utterly devoid of direction. Frankly, she wondered what people saw in him, and whatever it was, she sincerely wished they did not see it, and flatter and fool him and flock about him, to his further demoralization. She was rather sure that he had brains—it was hard, indeed, to see how he could escape them, but he concealed them like a deformity, and if he had convictions on any subject he was singularly adept at cloaking them in persiflage. Sometimes Mrs. Eugenia Parker went so far in her own mind as to wish that he had been old enough to be in the war; it seemed to her that drill and discipline, that hardship and horror, blood and agony, might have developed him, might, in the rubber-stamp phrase, have made a man of him: golf and tennis and polo and mountain climbing and mah jongg had not done so, up to date.
He continued to sleep, a faint smile on his wide mouth which turned up a little at the corners, even in repose, like a clown’s painted lips, beneath the pressure of her scorn and displeasure, and presently a sort of resentment rose in the earnest lady, and she laid hands upon him and shook him.
“Peter! Peter! Wake up!”
Peter woke up obediently, but by easy stages, and it was several moments before his mother could feel that she had really focused his attention upon the little paper she held in her hand.
He made a valiant effort to keep his eyes open. “Oh, I see.... Yes, certainly I understand, Eugenia....” He yawned enormously and smiled in deprecation. “Sorry! I get you perfectly. Some Red doesn’t care for my mill, isn’t that it?”
“Peter, that’s only part of it, only the beginning! Read it! Read it, and see if you can endure to have such things said of you!”
“Are they libels, Eugenia?”
The Federation President flushed suddenly and furiously. “No, Peter, no; that’s the most dreadful part of it. What this man says, in its essence, is true!”
“Well, then,” said her son, reasonably, “we can’t do anything about it, can we, Eugenia?” His mother sat down heavily in a chair beside the bed, and he regarded her warily. “Now, suppose I have my shower, and my coffee, and then we—besides, isn’t Miss Dexter waiting for you?”