Asking myself these questions, I accepted my invitation, and left the house with a heavy heart. That farewell kiss, that sudden composure when the day of the dinner was fixed, weighed on my spirits. I would have given twelve years of my life to have annihilated the next twelve hours.
In this frame of mind I reached home, and presented myself in my mother’s sitting-room.
“You have gone out earlier than usual to-day,” she said. “Did the fine weather tempt you, my dear?” She paused, and looked at me more closely. “George!” she exclaimed, “what has happened to you? Where have you been?”
I told her the truth as honestly as I have told it here.
The color deepened in my mother’s face. She looked at me, and spoke to me with a severity which was rare indeed in my experience of her.
“Must I remind you, for the first time in your life, of what is due to your mother?” she asked. “Is it possible that you expect me to visit a woman, who, by her own confession—”
“I expect you to visit a woman who has only to say the word and to be your daughter-in-law,” I interposed. “Surely I am not asking what is unworthy of you, if I ask that?”
My mother looked at me in blank dismay.
“Do you mean, George, that you have offered her marriage?”
“Yes.”