"I really must go, Aunt Helen," said Whitman, starting for the door. The "Aunt" was a heritage of an earlier and more innocent day and not an indication of blood relationship. "Uncle Julian" had, however, been allowed to lapse, upon Henry's accession to the Woodbridge Faculty.
"Oh dear," replied Mrs. Norris. "Well, I'm coming down to see Nancy as soon as she gets back, and then you've got to come up here for dinner. It will be such a relief having her here for the party. And now," she added, putting her arm through Tom's, "I must have a little talk with Tom. I suspect he needs a pill, and I'm going to give it to him. Come here, Tommy, dear, and let me look at you," and she pulled him back into the library.
III
MRS. NORRIS was about to force Tom down upon the Bosom when her eye was caught by the cheque-book on the table. "Oh, land," she exclaimed, "why didn't I give Henry his cheque! I've owed him for those German Socialist books he got me for I don't know how long, and here I've forgotten to give it to him. I must send Susan after him with it right away," and going over to a bell by the fireplace, she pushed it until Susan appeared. Then, looking at Tom, with her sweetest smile she asked, in her quietest voice, "Why don't you like Henry?"
"Why, I don't mind Henry."
"Oh, come now, Tommy." She moved over to "her" chair under the yellow lamp and, picking up the knitting immediately set the needles flying and clicking over one another. "You know you can't bear him. He is a little cut and dried—that's the trouble with him, I think—but then, as far as I can make out, you people in the classics and literatures are just as bad."
"Oh, Mrs. Norris."
"You are too. You are perfectly dreadful. Why, I can remember as well as anything, old Professor Packard standing up before that fireplace and saying, 'Helen,' says he, 'no gentleman is worthy the name who doesn't know his Horace.' 'Stuff,' says I, 'that's utter nonsense. You might as well say a gentlemen is not worthy of the name unless he knows his French for "fiddle-dee-dee"——like the Red Queen,'" and still knitting busily, she rocked with laughter.
Tom dropped into a chair beside her, threw one leg over the arm, and, pipe in hand, gazed at her affectionately. She was about the age his own mother would have been, he thought, in the immediate neighbourhood of sixty. But his own mother, who he knew had become reconciled to the life of Ephesus, could never have arrived at sixty with the imperious disregard for convention that was so perfectly Mrs. Norris's. Upon her face at present, as she looked down at her knitting, was a smiling benignity that would have recommended itself to the Virgin at Chartres; and at the same time her hair—what modest growth there was left—was uncurling itself from behind and threatening to pull down the whole structure after it. It was perfect, Tom told himself, and were he a sculptor commissioned to make her bust, he would do her just like that.