The Mother’s Recompense (Annotated) E-Book

Edith Wharton

• Herausgeber: ePembaBooks
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

• This edition includes the following editor's introduction: Edith Wharton, the feminism of a Pulitzer Prize winner

Originally published in 1925, "The Mother’s Recompense" is one of the last novels by the American writer Edith Wharton.

Opening on the French Riviera among a motley community of American expatriates, "The Mother's Recompense" tells the story of Kate Clephane and her reluctant return to New York society after being exiled years before for abandoning her husband and infant daughter. Curiously, Kate has been summoned back by that same daughter, Anne, now fully grown and intent on marrying Chris Fenno, a war hero, dilettante, and social opportunist. Chris's questionable intentions toward her daughter are, however, the least of Kate's worries since she was once, and still is, deeply in love with him.

Kate's moral quandary and the ensuing drama evoke comparison with “ Oedipus” and “ Hamlet” and lead to an ending that startled the mores of the day.

Leseprobe

Table of contents

Edith Wharton, the feminism of a Pulitzer Prize winner

THE MOTHER'S RECOMPENSE

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part 2

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part 3 - New part

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Edith Wharton, the feminism of a Pulitzer Prize winner

Literature has been consolidated over time as a small oasis for many writers and readers. Many saw and see in the pages of a book an escape from the routine and boredom characteristic of the society that surrounds them. Edith Wharton was also aware of this.

Edith Wharton, a well-known figure in American literature, received the call of writing from childhood. The writer's childhood and youth clearly marked her literary repertoire. These periods were characterized by the writer's loneliness, with an artificial mother, a distant father and a subsequent marriage of convenience that was defined by the author as one of her greatest mistakes and that would end in divorce years later. It was not until her encounter with the opera singer Camilla, when Wharton met true love. Her life, like that of many women of the time and later, was divided between her literary ambitions and the demands she encountered in the private sphere. Her fierce character made her a woman too different for her time, in the eyes not only of her husband, but also in the eyes of acquaintances and colleagues. The patrician New York in which she was born, raised and educated, was the main framework that inspired the criticism present in her novels, as well as her personal experiences and misfortunes were the basis of all her works. Undoubtedly, Edith Wharton's work marked a fundamental time in the transition to the European genre novel in American literature. In her novels we find a fierce criticism of the hostile economic and social laws that only generated benefits for a privileged few, as well as a clear social and sexual confinement characteristic of her protagonists. Thus, we observe in the same all kinds of issues related to the private sphere between men and women, whether adultery, restricted passion or marital conflicts. The work that brought Wharton the most fame and recognition in 1920 was "The Age of Innocence", which received a warm welcome. The Times Book Review itself dedicated an article to this work " a brilliant panorama of the New York of 45 years ago. The most requested novel in public libraries and a best seller in bookstores". In addition to this masterpiece, four earlier novels that tell the stories of women of her time are considered by many to be Wharton's true masterpieces, “The Greater Inclination” (1899), "Sanctuary" (1903), "The House of Mirth" (1905), “The Reef” (1912) and “Bunner Sisters” (1916).

Another significant and indispensable work of Wharton's for its maturity and masterful depiction of human feelings, "The Glimpses of the Moon" (1922), would come within a year after receiving the Pulitzer Prize in May 1921 for "The Age of Innocence." In later years Wharton would still be able to produce wonderful literary gems not so well known to the public such as " The Mother's Recompense" (1925). Edith Wharton's style had little or nothing to do with that of Henry James, her great friend, since it was characterized above all by a more realistic attitude in relation to the meticulous description of the chores and social changes of American life and society. One of the main characteristics of her work is the frequent use of irony. Born into the upper class of pre-war society, Wharton became one of the most astute critics of this social group. As a result of her great work, Edith Wharton won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1921, and in 1923 she was named Doctor honoris causa by Yale University. Leaving the novel "The Buccaneers" unfinished, Wharton died in 1937. Her last work was finished by Marion Mainwaring who found the synopsis and notes that the author left written. Wharton became with the passage of time an essential in the world of literature and a passionate critic of injustice and social inequality.

The Editor, P.C. 2022

THE MOTHER'S RECOMPENSE

Edith Wharton

Desolation is a delicate thing.

—Shelley

Part 1

Chapter 1

Kate Clephane was wakened, as usual, by the slant of Riviera sun across her bed. It was the thing she liked best about her shabby cramped room in the third-rate Hôtel de Minorque et de l'Univers: that the morning sun came in at her window, and yet that it didn't come too early.

No more sunrises for Kate Clephane. They were associated with too many lost joys—coming home from balls where one had danced one's self to tatters, or from suppers where one had lingered, counting one's winnings (it was wonderful, in the old days, how often she had won, or friends had won for her, staking a louis just for fun, and cramming her hands with thousand franc bills); associated, too, with the scramble up hill through the whitening gray of the garden, flicked by scented shrubs, caught on perfidious prickles, up to the shuttered villa askew on its heat-soaked rock—and then, at the door, in the laurustinus-shade that smelt of honey, that unexpected kiss (well honestly, yes, unexpected, since it had long been settled that one was to remain "just friends"); and the pulling away from an insistent arm, and the one more pressure on hers of lips young enough to be fresh after a night of drinking and play and more drinking. And she had never let Chris come in with her at that hour, no, not once, though at the time there was only Julie the cook in the house, and goodness knew … Oh, but she had always had her pride—people ought to remember that when they said such things about her …

That was what the sunrise reminded Kate Clephane of—as she supposed it did most women of forty-two or so (or was it really forty-four last week?). For nearly twenty years now she had lived chiefly with women of her own kind, and she no longer very sincerely believed there were any others, that is to say among women properly so called. Her female world was made up of three categories: frumps, hypocrites and the "good sort"—like herself. After all, the last was the one she preferred to be in.

Not that she could not picture another life—if only one had met the right man at the right hour. She remembered her one week—that tiny little week of seven days, just six years ago—when she and Chris had gone together to a lost place in Normandy where there wasn't a railway within ten miles, and you had to drive in the farmer's cart to the farm-house smothered in apple-blossoms; and Chris and she had gone off every morning for the whole day, while he sketched by willowy river-banks, and under the flank of mossy village churches; and every day for seven days she had watched the farmyard life waking at dawn under their windows, while she dashed herself with cold water and did her hair and touched up her face before he was awake, because the early light is so pitiless after thirty. She remembered it all, and how sure she had been then that she was meant to live on a farm and keep chickens; just as sure as he was that he was meant to be a painter, and would already have made a name if his parents hadn't called him back to Baltimore and shoved him into a broker's office after Harvard—to have him off their minds, as he said.

Yes, she could still picture that kind of life: every fibre in her kept its glow. But she didn't believe in it; she knew now that "things didn't happen like that" for long, that reality and durability were attributes of the humdrum, the prosaic and the dreary. And it was to escape from reality and durability that one plunged into cards, gossip, flirtation, and all the artificial excitements which society so lavishly provides for people who want to forget.

She and Chris had never repeated that week. He had never suggested doing so, and had let her hints fall unheeded, or turned them off with a laugh, whenever she tried, with shy tentative allusions, to coax him back to the idea; for she had found out early that one could never ask him anything point-blank—it just put his back up, as he said himself. One had to manoeuvre and wait; but when didn't a woman have to manoeuvre and wait? Ever since she had left her husband, eighteen years ago, what else had she ever done? Sometimes, nowadays, waking alone and unrefreshed in her dreary hotel room, she shivered at the memory of all the scheming, planning, ignoring, enduring, accepting, which had led her in the end to—this.

Ah, well—

"Aline!"

After all, there was the sun in her window, there was the triangular glimpse of blue wind-bitten sea between the roofs, and a new day beginning, and hot chocolate coming, and a new hat to try on at the milliner's, and—

"Aline!"

She had come to this cheap hotel just in order to keep her maid. One couldn't afford everything, especially since the war, and she preferred veal for dinner every night to having to do her own mending and dress her hair: the unmanageable abundant hair which had so uncannily survived her youth, and sometimes, in her happier moods, made her feel that perhaps, after all, in the eyes of her friends, other of its attributes survived also. And besides, it looked better for a lone woman who, after having been thirty-nine for a number of years, had suddenly become forty-four, to have a respectable-looking servant in the background; to be able, for instance, when one arrived in new places, to say to supercilious hotel-clerks: "My maid is following with the luggage."

"Aline!"

Aline, ugly, neat and enigmatic, appeared with the breakfast-tray. A delicious scent preceded her.

Mrs. Clephane raised herself on a pink elbow, shook her hair over her shoulders, and exclaimed: "Violets?"

Aline permitted herself her dry smile. "From a gentleman."

Colour flooded her mistress's face. Hadn't she known that something good was going to happen to her that morning—hadn't she felt it in every touch of the sunshine, as its golden finger-tips pressed her lids open and wound their way through her hair? She supposed she was superstitious. She laughed expectantly.

"A gentleman?"

"The little lame boy with the newspapers that Madame was kind to," the maid continued, arranging the tray with her spare Taylorized gestures.

"Oh, poor child!" Mrs. Clephane's voice had a quaver which she tried to deflect to the lame boy, though she knew how impossible it was to deceive Aline. Of course Aline knew everything—well, yes, that was the other side of the medal. She often said to her mistress: "Madame is too much alone—Madame ought to make some new friends—" and what did that mean, except that Aline knew she had lost the old ones?

But it was characteristic of Kate that, after a moment, the quaver in her voice did instinctively tilt in the direction of the lame boy who sold newspapers; and when the tears reached her eyes it was over his wistful image, and not her own, that they flowed. She had a way of getting desperately fond of people she had been kind to, and exaggeratedly touched by the least sign of their appreciation. It was her weakness—or her strength: she wondered which?

"Poor, poor little chap. But his mother'll beat him if she finds out. Aline, you must hunt him up this very day and pay back what the flowers must have cost him." She lifted the violets and pressed them to her face. As she did so she caught sight of a telegram beneath them.

A telegram—for her? It didn't often happen nowadays. But after all there was no reason why it shouldn't happen once again—at least once. There was no reason why, this very day, this day on which the sunshine had waked her with such a promise, there shouldn't be a message at last, the message for which she had waited for two years, three years; yes, exactly three years and one month—just a word from him to say: "Take me back."

She snatched up the telegram, and then turned her head toward the wall, seeking, while she read, to hide her face from Aline. The maid, on whom such hints were never lost, immediately transferred her attention to the dressing-table, skilfully deploying the glittering troops on that last battlefield where the daily struggle still renewed itself.

Aline's eyes averted, her mistress tore open the blue fold and read: "Mrs. Clephane dead—"

A shiver ran over her. Mrs. Clephane dead? Not if Mrs. Clephane knew it! Never more alive than today, with the sun crisping her hair, the violet scent enveloping her, and that jolly north-west gale rioting out there on the Mediterranean. What was the meaning of this grim joke?

The first shock over, she read on more calmly and understood. It was the other Mrs. Clephane who was dead: the one who used to be her mother-in-law. Her first thought was: "Well, serve her right"—since, if it was so desirable to be alive on such a morning it must be correspondingly undesirable to be dead, and she could draw the agreeable conclusion that the other Mrs. Clephane had at last been come up with—oh, but thoroughly.

She lingered awhile on this pleasing fancy, and then began to reach out to wider inferences. "But if—but if—but little Anne—"

At the murmur of the name her eyes filled again. For years now she had barricaded her heart against her daughter's presence; and here it was, suddenly in possession again, crowding out everything else, yes, effacing even Chris as though he were the thinnest of ghosts, and the cable in her hand a cockcrow. "But perhaps now they'll let me see her," the mother thought.

She didn't even know who "they" were, now that their formidable chieftain, her mother-in-law, was dead. Lawyers, judges, trustees, guardians, she supposed—all the natural enemies of woman. She wrinkled her brows, trying to remember who, at the death of the child's father, had been appointed the child's other guardian—old Mrs. Clephane's overpowering assumption of the office having so completely effaced her associate that it took a few minutes to fish him up out of the far-off past.

"Why, poor old Fred Landers, of course!" She smiled retrospectively. "I don't believe he'd prevent my seeing the child if he were left to himself. Besides, isn't she nearly grown up? Why, I do believe she must be."

The telegram fell from her hands, both of which she now impressed into a complicated finger-reckoning of how old little Anne must be, if Chris were thirty-three, as he certainly was—no, thirty-one, he couldn't be more than thirty-one, because she, Kate, was only forty-two … yes, forty-two … and she'd always acknowledged to herself that there were nine years between them; no, eleven years, if she were really forty-two; yes, but was she? Or, goodness, was she actually forty-five? Well, then, if she was forty-five—just supposing it for a minute—and had married John Clephane at twenty-one, as she knew she had, and little Anne had been born the second summer afterward, then little Anne must be nearly twenty … why, quite twenty, wasn't it? But then, how old would that make Chris? Oh, well, he must be older than he looked … she'd always thought he was. That boyish way of his, she had sometimes fancied, was put on to make her imagine there was a greater difference of age between them than there really was—a device he was perfectly capable of making use of for ulterior purposes. And of course she'd never been that dreadful kind of woman they called a "baby-snatcher"… But if Chris were thirty-one, and she forty-five, then how old was Anne?

With impatient fingers she began all over again.

The maid's voice, seeming to come from a long way off, respectfully reminded her that the chocolate would be getting cold. Mrs. Clephane roused herself, looked about the room, and exclaimed: "My looking-glass, please." She wanted to settle that question of ages.

As Aline approached with the glass there was a knock at the door. The maid went to it, and came back with her small inward smile.

"Another telegram."

Another? This time Mrs. Clephane sat bolt upright. What could it be, now, but a word from him, a message at last? Oh, but she was ashamed of herself for thinking of such a thing at such a moment. Solitude had demoralized her, she supposed. And then her child was so far away, so invisible, so unknown—and Chris of a sudden had become so near and real again, though it was three whole years and one month since he had left her. And at her age—She opened the second message, trembling. Since Armistice Day her heart had not beat so hard.

"New York. Dearest mother," it ran, "I want you to come home at once. I want you to come and live with me. Your daughter Anne."

"You asked for the looking-glass, Madame," Aline patiently reminded her.

Mrs. Clephane took the proffered glass, stared into it with eyes at first unseeing, and then gradually made out the reflection of her radiant irrepressible hair, a new smile on her lips, the first streak of gray on her temples, and the first tears—oh, she couldn't remember for how long—running down over her transfigured face.

"Aline—" The maid was watching her with narrowed eyes. "The Rachel powder, please—"

Suddenly she dropped the glass and the powderpuff, buried her face in her hands, and sobbed.

Chapter 2

She went out an hour later, her thoughts waltzing and eddying like the sunlit dust which the wind kept whirling round the corners in spasmodic gusts. Everything in her mind was hot and cold, and beating and blowing about, like the weather on that dancing draughty day; the very pavement of the familiar streets, and the angles of the buildings, seemed to be spinning with the rest, as if the heaviest substances had suddenly grown imponderable.

"It must," she thought, "be a little like the way the gravestones will behave on the Day of Judgment."

To make sure of where she was she had to turn down one of the white streets leading to the sea, and fix her eyes on that wedge of blue between the houses, as if it were the only ballast to her brain, the only substantial thing left. "I'm glad it's one of the days when the sea is firm," she thought. The glittering expanse, flattened by the gale and solidified by the light, rose up to meet her as she walked toward it, the pavement lifting her and flying under her like wings till it dropped her down in the glare of the Promenade, where the top-knots of the struggling palms swam on the wind like chained and long-finned sea-things against that sapphire wall climbing half-way up the sky.

She sat down on a bench, clinging sideways as if lashed to a boat's deck, and continued to steady her eyes on the Mediterranean. To collect her thoughts she tried to imagine that nothing had happened, that neither of the two cables had come, and that she was preparing to lead her usual life, as mapped out in the miniature engagement-book in her handbag. She had her "set" now in the big Riviera town where she had taken refuge in 1916, after the final break with Chris, and where, after two years of war-work and a "Reconnaissance Française" medal, she could carry her head fairly high, and even condescend a little to certain newcomers.

She drew forth the engagement-book, smiling at her childish game of "pretending." At eleven, a hat to try on; eleven-thirty, a dress; from then to two o'clock, nothing; at two, a slow solemn drive with poor old Mrs. Minity (in the last-surviving private victoria in the town); tea and bridge at Countess Lanska's from four to six; a look in at the Rectory of the American church, where there was a Ladies' Guild meeting about the Devastated Regions' Fancy Fair; lastly a little dinner at the Casino, with the Horace Betterlys and a few other pals. Yes—a rather-better-than-the-average day. And now—Why, now she could kick over the whole applecart if she chose; chuck it all (except the new dress and hat!): the tedious drive with the prosy patronizing old woman; the bridge, which was costing her more than it ought, with that third-rate cosmopolitan set of Laura Lanska's; the long discussion at the Rectory as to whether it would "do" to ask Mrs. Schlachtberger to take a stall at the Fair in spite of her unfortunate name; and the little dinner with the Horace Betterlys and their dull noisy friends, who wanted to "see life" and didn't know that you can't see it unless you've first had the brains to imagine it … Yes, she could drop it all now, and never never see one of them again …

"My daughter … my daughter Anne … Oh, you don't know my little girl? She has changed, hasn't she? Growing up is a way the children have … Yes, it is ageing for a poor mother to trot about such a young giantess … Oh, I'm going gray already, you know—here, on the temples. Fred Landers? It is you, really? Dear old Fred! No, of course I've never forgotten you … Known me anywhere? You would? Oh, nonsense! Look at my gray hair. But men don't change—lucky men! Why, I remember even that Egyptian seal-ring of yours … My daughter … my daughter Anne … let me introduce you to this big girl of mine … my little Anne … "

It was curious: for the first time she realized that, in thinking back over the years since she had been parted from Anne, she seldom, nowadays, went farther than the episode with Chris. Yet it was long before—it was eighteen years ago—that she had "lost" Anne: "lost" was the euphemism she had invented (as people called the Furies The Amiable Ones), because a mother couldn't confess, even to her most secret self, that she had willingly deserted her child. Yet that was what she had done; and now her thoughts, shrinking and shivering, were being forced back upon the fact. She had left Anne when Anne was a baby of three; left her with a dreadful pang, a rending of the inmost fibres, and yet a sense of unutterable relief, because to do so was to escape from the oppression of her married life, the thick atmosphere of self-approval and unperceivingness which emanated from John Clephane like coal-gas from a leaking furnace. So she had put it at the time—so, in her closest soul-scrutiny, she had to put it still. "I couldn't breathe—" that was all she had to say in her own defence. She had said it first—more's the pity—to Hylton Davies; with the result that two months later she was on his yacht, headed for the West Indies … And even then she couldn't breathe any better; not after the first week or two. The asphyxiation was of a different kind, that was all.

It was a year later that she wrote to her husband. There was no answer: she wrote again. "At any rate, let me see Anne … I can't live without Anne … I'll go and live with her anywhere you decide … " Again no answer … She wrote to her mother-in-law, and Mrs. Clephane's lawyer sent the letter back unopened. She wrote, in her madness, to the child's nurse, and got a reply from the same legal firm, requesting her to cease to annoy her husband's family. She ceased.

Of all this she recalled now only the parting from Anne, and the subsequent vain efforts to recover her. Of the agent of her release, of Hylton Davies, she remembered, in the deep sense of remembering, nothing. He had become to her, with his flourish and his yachting-clothes, and the big shining yacht, and the cocoa-palms and general setting of cool drinks and tropical luxury, as unreal as somebody in a novel, the highly coloured hero (or villain) on the "jacket". From her inmost life he had vanished into a sort of remote pictorial perspective, where a woman of her name figured with him, in muslin dresses and white sunshades, herself as unreal as a lady on a "jacket" … Dim also had grown the years that followed: lonely humdrum years at St.-Jean-de-Luz, at Bordighera, at Dinard. She would settle in a cheap place where there were a circulating library, a mild climate, a few quiet bridge-playing couples whom one got to know through the doctor or the clergyman; then would grow tired and drift away again. Once she went back to America, at the time of her mother's death … It was in midsummer, and Anne (now ten years old) was in Canada with her father and grandmother. Kate Clephane, not herself a New Yorker, and with only two or three elderly and disapproving relatives left in the small southern city of her origin, stood alone before the elaborately organized defences of a vast New York clan, and knew herself helpless. But in her madness she dreamed of a dash to Canada, an abduction—schemes requiring money, friends, support, all the power and ruse she was so lacking in. She gave that up in favour of a midnight visit (inspired by Anna Karénine) to the child's nursery; but on the way to Quebec she heard that the family had left in a private car for the Rocky Mountains. She turned about and took the first steamer to France.

All this, too, had become dim to her since she had known Chris. For the first time, when she met him, her soul's lungs seemed full of air. Life still dated for her from that day—in spite of the way he had hurt her, of his having inflicted on her the bitterest pain she had ever suffered, he had yet given her more than he could take away. At thirty-nine her real self had been born; without him she would never have had a self … And yet, at what a cost she had bought it! All the secluded penitential years that had gone before wiped out at a stroke—stained, defiled by follies she could not bear to think of, among people from whom her soul recoiled. Poor Chris! It was not that he was what is called "vicious"—but he was never happy without what he regarded as excitement; he was always telling her that an artist had to have excitement. She could not reconcile his idea of what this stimulus consisted in with his other tastes and ideas—with that flashing play of intelligence which had caught her up into an air she had never breathed before. To be capable of that thought-play, of those flights, and yet to need gambling, casinos, rowdy crowds, and all the pursuits devised to kill time for the uninventive and lethargic! He said he saw things in that kind of life that she couldn't see—but since he also saw this unseeable (and she knew he did) in nature, in poetry and painting, in their shared sunsets and moonrises, in their first long dreaming days, far from jazz-bands and baccarat tables, why wasn't that enough, and how could the other rubbishy things excite the same kind of emotions in him? It had been the torment of her torments, the inmost pang of her misery, that she had never understood; and that when she thought of him now it was through that blur of noise and glare and popping corks and screaming bands that she had to grope back to the first fleeting Chris who had loved her and waked her.

At eleven o'clock she found herself, she didn't know how, at the milliner's. Other women, envious or undecided, were already flattening their noses against the panes. "That bird of Paradise … what they cost nowadays!" But she went in, cool and confident, and asked gaily to try on her new hat. She must have been smiling, for the saleswoman received her with a smile.

"What a complexion, ma'am! One sees you're not afraid of the wind."

But when the hat was produced, though it was the copy of one she had already tried on, it struck Mrs. Clephane as absurdly youthful, even ridiculous. Had she really been dressing all this time like a girl in her teens?

"You forget that I've a grown-up daughter, Madame Berthe."

"Allons, Madame plaisante!"

She drew herself up with dignity. "A daughter of twenty-one; I'm joining her in New York next week. What would she think of me if I arrived in a hat more youthful than hers? Show me something darker, please: yes, the one with the autumn leaves. See, I'm growing gray on the temples—don't try to make me look like a flapper. What's the price of that blue fox over there? I like a gray fur with gray hair."

In the end she stalked out, offended by the milliner's refusal to take her gray hair seriously, and reflecting, with a retrospective shiver, that her way of dressing and her demeanour must have thoroughly fixed in all these people's minds the idea that she was one of the silly vain fools who imagine they look like their own daughters.

At the dress-maker's, the scene repeated itself. The dashing little frock prepared for her—an orange silk handkerchief peeping from the breast-pocket on which an anchor was embroidered—made her actually blush; and reflecting that money wouldn't "matter" now (the thought of the money had really not come to her before) she persuaded the dressmaker to take the inappropriate garment back, and ordered, instead, something sober but elaborate, and ever so much more expensive. It seemed a part of the general unreal rapture that even the money-worry should have vanished.

Where should she lunch? She inclined to a quiet restaurant in a back street; then the old habit of following the throng, the need of rubbing shoulders with a crowd of unknown people, swept her automatically toward the Casino, and sat her down, in a blare of brass instruments and hard sunshine, at the only table left. After all, as she had often heard Chris say, one could feel more alone in a crowd … But gradually it came over her that to feel alone was not in the least what she wanted. She had never, for years at any rate, been able to bear it for long; the crowd, formerly a solace and an escape, had become a habit, and being face to face with her own thoughts was like facing a stranger. Oppressed and embarrassed, she tried to "make conversation" with herself; but the soundless words died unuttered, and she sought distraction in staring about her at the unknown faces.

Their number became oppressive: it made her feel small and insignificant to think that, of all this vulgar feasting throng, not one knew the amazing thing which had befallen her, knew that she was awaited by an only daughter in a big house in New York, a house she would re-enter in a few days—yes, actually in a few days—with the ease of a long-absent mistress, a mistress returning from an immense journey, but to whom it seems perfectly natural and familiar to be once again smiling on old friends from the head of her table.

The longing to be with people to whom she could tell her news made her decide, after all, to live out her day as she had originally planned it. Before leaving the hotel she had announced her departure to the astonished Aline (it was agreeable, for once, to astonish Aline) and despatched her to the post office with a cable for New York and a telegram for a Paris steamship company. In the cable she had said simply: "Coming darling." They were the words with which she used to answer little Anne's calls from the nursery: that impatient reiterated "Mummy—Mummy—I want my Mummy!" which had kept on echoing in her ears through so many sleepless nights. The phrase had flashed into her head the moment she sat down to write the cable, and she had kept murmuring to herself ever since: "Mummy—Mummy—I want my Mummy!" She would have liked to quote the words to Mrs. Minity, whose door she was now approaching; but how could she explain to the old lady, who was deaf and self-absorbed, and thought it a privilege for any one to go driving with her, why little Anne's cry had echoed so long in the void? No; she could not speak of that to any one: she must stick to her old "take-it-for-granted" attitude, the attitude which had carried her successfully over so many slippery places.

Mrs. Minity was very much pre-occupied about her foot-warmer. She spent the first quarter of an hour in telling Mrs. Clephane that the Rector's wife, whom she had taken out the day before, had possessed herself of the object without so much as a "may I," and kept her big feet on it till Mrs. Minity had had to stop the carriage and ask the coachman in a loud voice how it was that The Foot-warmer had not been put in as usual. Whereupon, if you please, Mrs. Merriman had simply said: "Oh, I have it, thanks, dear Mrs. Minity—such a comfort, on these windy days!" "Though why a woman who keeps no carriage, and has to tramp the streets at all hours, should have cold feet I can't imagine—nor, in fact, wholly believe her when she says so," said Mrs. Minity, in the tone of one to whom a defective circulation is the recognized prerogative of carriage-owners. "I notice, my dear, that you never complain of being cold," she added approvingly, relegating Kate, as an enforced pedestrian, to Mrs. Merriman's class, but acknowledging in her a superior sense of propriety. "I'm always glad," she added, "to take you out on windy days, for battling with the mistral on foot must be so very exhausting, and in the carriage, of course, it is so easy to reach a sheltered place."

Mrs. Minity was still persuaded that to sit in her hired victoria, behind its somnolent old pair, was one of the most rapid modes of progression devised by modern science. She talked as if her carriage were an aeroplane, and was as particular in avoiding narrow streets, and waiting at the corner when she called for friends who lived in them, as if she had to choose a safe alighting-ground.

Mrs. Minity had come to the Riviera thirty years before, after an attack of bronchitis, and finding the climate milder and the life easier than in Brooklyn, had not gone back. Mrs. Clephane never knew what roots she had broken in the upheaval, for everything immediately surrounding her assumed such colossal proportions that remoter facts, even concerning herself, soon faded to the vanishing-point. Only now and then, when a niece from Bridgeport sent her a bottle of brandy-peaches, or a nephew from Brooklyn wrote to say that her income had been reduced by the foreclosure of a mortgage, did the family emerge from its transatlantic mists, and Mrs. Minity become, for a moment, gratified or irate at the intrusion. But such emotions, at their acutest, were but faint shadows of those aroused by the absence of her foot-warmer, or the Salvation Army's having called twice in the same month for her subscription, or one of the horses having a stiff shoulder, and being replaced, for a long hazardous week, by another, known to the same stable for twenty years, and whom the patron himself undertook to drive, so that Mrs. Minity should not miss her airing. She had thought of staying in till her own horse recovered; but the doctor had absolutely forbidden it, so she had taken her courage in both hands, and gone out with the substitute, who was not even of the same colour as the horse she was used to. "But I took valerian every night," she added, "and doubled my digitalis."

Kate Clephane, as she listened (for the hundredth time), remembered that she had once thought Mrs. Minity a rather impressive old lady, somewhat arrogant and very prosy, but with a distinct "atmosphere," and a charming half-obsolete vocabulary, suggesting "Signers" and Colonial generals, which was a refreshing change from the over-refinement of Mrs. Merriman and the Betterlys' monotonous slang. Now, compared to certain long-vanished figures of the Clephane background—compared even to the hated figure of old Mrs. Clephane—Mrs. Minity shrank to the semblance of a vulgar fussy old woman.

"Old Mrs. Clephane never bragged, whatever she did," Kate thought: "how ridiculous all that fuss about driving behind a strange horse would have seemed to her. After all, good breeding, even in the odious, implies a certain courage … " Her mother-in-law, as she mused, assumed the commanding yet not unamiable shape of a Roman matron of heroic mould, a kind of "It-hurts-not-O-my-Pætus," falling first upon the sword.