“Yes, really! It’s only that I—I’ve always been a little over-balanced, you know, if such a state were possible. And it is,” tensely, “outside of mathematics.”
Mrs. Loring—whose intimacy with mathematics was fleeting—looked at her daughter anxiously. “Just what do you mean, Lucy? There, my dear—throw your coat off. And your hat—so! Jacqueline will unpack you while we have our tea. Tell me what you mean—over-balanced?” She inclined her well-dressed head vaguely.
“I mean,” said Lucia, pressing back against a nest of cushions, “just that. All my life I’ve seen things evenly, mother: in parallel rows, that always tallied. When you sent me to finishing-school, I hated it; but I put up with the two years’ boredom without complaint, because I realized it was making valuable friends for me. When I took up drawing, later, I did it because I knew that on the other side of the hard work and cruel discouragement in getting started, would lie a hobby—and a profitable one—in which I might bury myself at any time, and with absorbing interest. And when I married——”
“Yes?” Mrs. Loring sat forward a little.
“You thought I never would marry, didn’t you, mother darling?” with a brief laugh. “I was afraid of marriage, rather. But when John came, and I thought I cared enough and—well, it seemed to me that if I went into the thing with no illusions, I couldn’t lose any. That if I got married, just because I wanted to,—if I expected nothing, at least I couldn’t get less.”
“Lucy,” put in her mother uncomfortably, “you think too much. You always did. Cream, my dear?”
“Please. I said, when I came in, I’d come for a very long visit.”
“Isn’t John Gwynne a good husband?” demanded Mrs. Loring. “Is there anything——?”
“Oh, nothing—nothing. Our life is as even as the lines in my account-book. That,” said Lucia in a low voice, “is what I simply can’t stand; what I had to get away from.”
“But—but, my dear, it doesn’t sound very serious. Really, you know, it doesn’t!”