Mrs. Winters gestures at it refinedly—she never points—as Nancy comes in to breakfast looking as if whatever sleep she had had not done her very much good.
“From your dear, dear mother, I should imagine,” she adds in sugared watery tones.
Nancy opens it without much interest—Mother, oh, yes, Mother. Six crossed pages of St. Louis gossip and wanderingly fluent advice. She sets herself to read it, though, dutifully enough—she is under Mrs. Winters' eyes.
Father's usual September cold. The evil ways of friends' servants. Good wishes to Mrs. Winters. “Heart's Gold—such a really inspiring moving-picture.” Advice. Advice. Then, half-way down the next to last page Nancy stops puzzledly. She doesn't quite understand.
“And hope, my daughter, that now you are really cured though you may have passed through bitter waters but all such things are but God's divine will to chasten us. And when the young man told me of his escapade I felt that even over the telephone he might have”
She sets herself wearily to decode some sort of definite meaning out of Mother's elliptic style. An escapade. Of Oliver? and over the telephone—what was that? Mother hadn't said anything—
She finishes the letter and then rereads all the parts of it that seem to have any bearing on the cryptogram, and finally near the end, and evidently connected with the “telephone,” she comes upon the phrase “that day.”
There is only one day that Mother alludes to as “That Day” now. Before her broken engagement “That Day” was when Father failed.
But Oliver hadn't telephoned—she'd asked Mother particularly if he had, and he hadn't. But surely if he had telephoned, surely, surely, Mother would have told her about it—Mother would have known that there were a few things where she really hadn't any right to interfere.
Mother had never liked Oliver, though she'd pretended. Never.