When Dan used to come home from Harvard she put on a pretty cap for him, and distinguished him as company by certain laces hiding her wasted frame, and giving their pathetic coquetry to her transparent wrists. He was her favourite, and the girls acknowledged him so, and made their fun of her for spoiling him. He found out as he grew up that her broken health dated from his birth, and at first this deeply affected him; but his young life soon lost the keenness of the impression, and he loved his mother because she loved him, and not because she had been dying for him so many years.
As he now came into her room, and the waiting-woman went out of it with her usual, “Well, Mr. Dan!” the tenderness which filled him at sight of his mother was mixed with that sense of guilt which had tormented him at times ever since he met his sisters. He was going to take himself from her; he realised that.
“Well, Dan!” she called, so gaily that he said to himself, “No, father hasn't told her anything about it,” and was instantly able to answer her as cheerfully, “Well, mother!”
He bent over her to kiss her, and the odour of the clean linen mingling with that of the opium, and the cologne with which she had tried to banish its scent, opened to him one of those vast reaches of associations which perfumes can unlock, and he saw her lying there through those years of pain, as many as half his life, and suddenly the tears gushed into his eyes, and he fell on his knees, and hid his face in the bed-clothes and sobbed.
She kept smoothing his head, which shook under her thin hand, and saying, “Poor Dan! poor Dan!” but did not question him. He knew that she knew what he had come to tell her, and that his tears, which had not been meant for that, had made interest with her for him and his cause, and that she was already on his side.
He tried boyishly to dignify the situation when he lifted his face, and he said, “I didn't mean to come boohooing to you in this way, and I'm ashamed of myself.”
“I know, Dan; but you've been wrought up, and I don't wonder. You mustn't mind your father and your sisters. Of course, they're rather surprised, and they don't like your taking yourself from them—we, none of us do.”
At these honest words Dan tried to become honest too. At least he dropped his pretence of dignity, and became as a little child in his simple greed for sympathy. “But it isn't necessarily that; is it, mother?”
“Yes, it's all that, Dan; and it's all right, because it's that. We don't like it, but our not liking it has nothing to do with its being right or wrong.”
“I supposed that father would have been pleased, anyway; for he has seen her, and—and. Of course the girls haven't, but I think they might have trusted my judgment a little. I'm not quite a fool.”