It was because of Mrs. Follette’s social complexes that Jane had been forced to limit her invitations for the Thanksgiving dinner. She would have preferred more people to liven things up for Evans and Baldy, but Mrs. Follette’s prejudices had to be considered.
Evans, democratic, like his father, laughed at his mother’s assumptions. But he rarely in these days set himself against her. It involved always a contest, and he was tired of fighting.
That was why he had asked Jane to help him in the stand he had taken against the New York trip. He felt that he could never hold out against his mother’s arguments.
“She’d keep eternally at it, and I’d have to give in,” he told himself with the irritability which was so new to him and so surprising. As a boy he had been good-tempered even in moments of disagreement with his mother.
Going down to luncheon, he hoped the subject would not come up. The afternoon was before him, and Jane. He wanted no cloud to mar it.
On the steps he passed Mary, his mother’s maid, making the house immaculate for the guests of to-morrow. She was singing an old song, linking herself musically with the black men of generations back. Mary was over sixty, and her voice was thin and piping. Yet there was, after all, a sort of fierce power in that thin and piping voice.
“Stay in the fiel’,
Stay in the fiel’, oh, wah-yah—
Stay in the fiel’
Till the wah is ended.”