Minerva took a long look, a sad look, this time, at the Rhineland castles imbedded vaguely in panels of crimson wallpaper. “You,” she said, “are the greatest triumph of my life.
But my sorrow is—I have you alone, Kit. Just you. I desperately longed for a big family. We needed children. Our holdings—the businesses—”
This, as her son suspected, was not wholly true. A large number of offspring would have provided stewards for the Sloan interprises; but Minerva, after painfully bearing one child, had taken counsel with half a dozen obstetricians and gynecologists to make sure nothing so agonizing and humiliating as childbirth would happen to her again. “I am determined,” his mother went on, “that you shall make a suitable marriage and provide me with grandchildren to replace the little brothers and sisters I was never able to supply for you, Kit.”
“I know! But—”
“A day,” his mother said firmly, “is surely coming when you cannot temporize. You’re well over thirty, Kit, and I’m aging…” She looked away a third time, her large face working a little. “Besides—”
“Besides?” If there was to be a new element in this old discussion he wanted to know it.
“Do you know, Kit, the Adams girl tried to get money from me, again?”
“Lord! I wish I’d never seen that babe!”
“You did, though. A bit too much of her. If you had been married, Kit, she wouldn’t have hag the gall—or the public sympathy—” He laughed. “Isn’t that a shade unethical, Muzz? To advocate marriage as a cover for carnal sin?”
“Unethical?” She tasted the word as if it were foreign. Her large eyes glinted. “Possibly.