Lucia, during dinner, thought about it. It was a new kind of thinking for her: what she didn’t know; what she could not possibly determine; what didn’t balance with anything else. In it, she forgot the somewhat disheartening disclosures of the day’s work—that her technique was laborious rather than a joy—that it was hard, impossible almost, to get back at the end of the years; and remembered to write to Tommy. She wondered if he had put his boots away, and if he was homesick. Funny little freckle-faced Tommy! Two stubborn tears, like those that had worked their way out of his brave brown eyes when he parted from her, rose suddenly to Lucia’s. How weak she was! she told herself, the next minute, impatiently.
But she wrote to Tommy that night, before she went to bed. And at the end she said—instead of the caution about colds he hated so—“Mother wishes she could kiss you good-night—really, truly good-night, little son!” When she had sent the letter, she was inclined to be scornful of that last bit. The foolish third person—it was only an advanced baby-talk, that in her training of Tommy she had rigorously excluded.
Next day she worked harder than ever, and when John’s telegram came, she did not even know it. She was upstairs, putting her eyes out drawing a bit of lace on the gown of a gorgeous Wenzell lady. Come right, it would not. All afternoon she toiled; got a smudge on her nose that stayed there when Ada Barker came to tea, and a general irritability that caused that young woman to say later, “Well, I didn’t know Lucia Gwynne had gone off so! She’s positively untidy, and so sharp!”
That, Lucia’s mother had reason to echo during those twenty-four hours. But mothers don’t echo, somehow. They exonerate. Mrs. Loring was kept busy exonerating, while that bit of lace tied itself up in knots, and haughtily refused unravelling. When in the evening John Gwynne wired “why doesn’t Lucia write to me?” Lucia’s mother replied, “She’s drawing a piece of lace.” When, an hour later, he demanded, “What in thunder ails her?” Mrs. Loring wired back, “Why don’t you come and see for yourself?”
Three days after Lucia had arrived, throwing herself down on the little sofa, her husband followed suit. He looked extraordinarily big there.
“Where’s Lucia?” he asked instantly.
“Drawing lace,” said Mrs. Loring—about whose pretty mouth were little lines.
“Is she mad?” demanded her husband.
“She has been—very near it.” Mrs. Loring looked intently into Gwynne’s face. “Lucia thinks too much. You don’t give her enough to do.”