“I don’t believe there was any other girl. I never thought there was more than one.”
“There seemed to be two styles and two grades of culture, such as they were.”
“Oh, she could easily imitate two manners. She must have been a clever girl,” Mrs. Verrian said, with that admiration for any sort of cleverness in her sex which even very good women cannot help feeling.
“Well, perhaps she was punished enough for both the characters she assumed,” Verrian said, with a smile that was not gay.
“Don’t think about her!” his mother returned, with a perception of his mood. “I’m only thankful that she’s out of our lives in every sort of way.”
VI.
Verrian said nothing, but he reflected with a sort of gloomy amusement how impossible it was for any woman, even a woman so wide-minded and high-principled as his mother, to escape the personal view of all things and all persons which women take. He tacitly noted the fact, as the novelist notes whatever happens or appears to him, but he let the occasion drop out of his mind as soon as he could after it had dropped out of his talk.
The night when the last number of his story came to them in the magazine, and was already announced as a book, he sat up with his mother celebrating, as he said, and exulting in the future as well as the past. They had a little supper, which she cooked for him in a chafing-dish, in the dining-room of the tiny apartment where they lived together, and she made some coffee afterwards, to carry off the effect of the Newburg lobster. Perhaps because there was nothing to carry off the effect of the coffee, he heard her, through the partition of their rooms, stirring restlessly after he had gone to bed, and a little later she came to his door, which she set ajar, to ask, “Are you awake, Philip?”
“You seem to be, mother,” he answered, with an amusement at her question which seemed not to have imparted itself to her when she came in and stood beside his bed in her dressing-gown.