“Nothing. We must let things take their course.”
They had a great deal more talk that came to the same end. They played their sad comedy, he in the part of a father determined to save his child from herself, and she in hers of resisting and withholding him. It ended as it had so often ended before—he yielded, with more faith in her wisdom than she had herself.
At luncheon the Bittridges could not join the Kentons, or be asked to do so, because the table held only four, but they stopped on their way to their own table, the mother to bridle and toss in affected reluctance, while the son bragged how he had got the last two tickets to be had that night for the theatre where he was going to take his mother. He seemed to think that the fact had a special claim on the judge’s interest, and she to wish to find out whether Mrs. Kenton approved of theatre-going. She said she would not think of going in Ballardsville, but she supposed it was more rulable in New York.
During the afternoon she called at the Kenton apartment to consult the ladies about what she ought to wear. She said she had nothing but a black ‘barege’ along, and would that do with the hat she had on? She had worn it to let them see, and now she turned her face from aide to side to give them the effect of the plumes, that fell like a dishevelled feather-duster round and over the crown. Mrs. Kenton could only say that it would do, but she believed that it was the custom now for ladies to take their hats off in the theatre.
Mrs. Bittridge gave a hoarse laugh. “Oh, dear! Then I’ll have to fix my hair two ways? I don’t know what Clarence WILL say.”
The mention of her son’s name opened the way for her to talk of him in relation to herself, and the rest of her stay passed in the celebration of his filial virtues, which had been manifest from the earliest period. She could not remember that she ever had to hit the child a lick, she said, or that he had ever made her shed a tear.
When she went, Boyne gloomily inquired, “What makes her hair so much darker at the roots than it is at the points?” and his mother snubbed him promptly.
“You had no business to be here, Boyne. I don’t like boys hanging about where ladies are talking together, and listening.”
This did not prevent Lottie from answering, directly for Boyne, and indirectly for Ellen, “It’s because it’s begun to grow since the last bleach.”
It was easier to grapple with Boyne than with Lottie, and Mrs. Kenton was willing to allow her to leave the room with her brother unrebuked. She was even willing to have had the veil lifted from Mrs. Bittridge’s hair with a rude hand, if it world help Ellen.