“If I were you, dear, I would let Mr. Lane tell me about his doctor. New discoveries are often made by queer people.”
Roma’s voice was low and sympathetic; she never lost her dignity.
Florence asked if she might have her coffee in her room, while she dashed off a note, and she ran upstairs humming “Bright Lights” and wondering how she was going to stand her family until the summer scattering. Why could Roma never throw off her elegant reserve and call things by their names? She sometimes thought she might like her sister, if she would only come out in the open and howl about her disappointments.
Roma, drinking her coffee deliberately, asked her father if they might have the car early, as they wanted to pick up Mr. Allen and Mr. Rydberg on their way to rehearsal.
Wanning said certainly. Heaven knew he was not stingy about his car, though he could never quite forget that in his day it was the young men who used to call for the girls when they went to rehearsals.
“You are going with us, Mother?” Roma asked as they rose.
“I think so dear. Your father will want to go to bed early, and I shall sleep better if I go out. I am going to town tomorrow to pour tea for Harold. We must get him some new silver, Paul. I am quite ashamed of his spoons.”
Harold, the only son, was a playwright—as yet “unproduced”—and he had a studio in Washington Square.
A half-hour later, Wanning was alone in his library. He would not permit himself to feel aggrieved. What was more commendable than a mother’s interest in her children’s pleasures? Moreover, it was his wife’s way of following things up, of never letting die grass grow under her feet, that had helped to push him along in the world. She was more ambitious than he,—that had been good for him. He was naturally indolent, and Julia’s childlike desire to possess material objects, to buy what other people were buying, had been the spur that made him go after business. It had, moreover, made his house the attractive place he believed it to be.
“Suppose,” his wife sometimes said to him when the bills came in from Céleste or Mme. Blanche, “suppose you had homely daughters; how would you like that?”