She passed that up with a gesture that was partly disdainful and partly indulgent. She thought, with pride, that the Sloan men had always possessed a way with women. She was able to feel pride, not rancor, now that her husband was occupying a plot in Shadyknoll, with a thirty-foot obelisk to mark the grave of a great industrialist, banker and rakehell. Her son’s
“conquests,” as she thought them (though he rarely found himself obliged to use aggression), did not in her opinion belong in the same category as her late husband’s “vices.” There was the mitigating fact that Kittridge was an “irresistible young man”; her spouse had been an “old fool”; there was a further alleviating circumstance in the fact that morals, amongst smart young people, had changed. In sum, there was (though she did not admit it) the fact that her husband’s perennial blonde had driven Minerva half mad with jealous fury, while she found herself taking in her son’s amours an almost masculine and quasi-participatory interest.
“You in love with Lenore?”
“Hell, Muzz. I love ’em all—if they’re pretty. If they’re as pretty as she, I love double.”
“She’s an interesting girl.”
“How do you know?” he inquired with ample suspicion, and he said in the same breath,
“This is good soup.”
“You better not have any more. There’s roast beef—Yorkshire pudding—I knew you’d be famished.”
“How do you know so much about Lenore? She belong to some ladies’ aid—or something? You don’t see her in church much. She doesn’t go.”
“The girls that interest you, Kit, naturally interest me.” She sighed lightly. “I’m getting older every year….”