To this there were several retorts I could have made, any of them quite crushing to Annette; but I was thinking of the practical difficulties before us. The rôle of unscrupulous coquette was the last in which Regina would care to appear; that of cad was equally distasteful to me. Had it been possible to make one plunge and be over with it, it would have been different; as it was, the preliminaries—the facing of all the people who would have to be faced—the explaining all the things that would have to be explained—couldn’t but be devilish.
I was just beginning, “Why should you assume that we are thinking of any such thing—?”
But before I could finish the sentence the door opened gently and a maid’s voice announced, “Mrs. Barry.”
Of all the people in the world, this lady was the last I wanted to meet at that moment. Knowing how I must have figured in her eyes in the past, I was planning for the future to figure in a worse light still. I had thrown her kindness back in her face and never given her an explanation. She must have known that my seeming flight from Long Island after that last Sunday in June, 1914, had left her daughter unhappy; and the reason had remained a mystery.
She gave me the first glance as she entered, and only the second to our hostess. The awful severity of those who are temperamentally gentle and unjudging was in the very coldness of her eye.
She was a charming, delicate, semi-invalid woman who seemed to have been spun, like the clothes she wore, out of the least durable materials in life. Regina had the same traits, but harder, stronger, and more lasting. It was difficult to think of the latter as an invalid; while you couldn’t see the mother as anything else.
Prettily old-fashioned, she seemed not to have changed her style of dressing since the eighteen-seventies. The small bonnet might have dated from the epoch of professional beauties when Mrs. Langtry was a girl. The long fur pelisse with loose hanging sleeves was of no period at all. I think she wore a train. In her own house she habitually did, and she seemed to have just flung on the pelisse and driven down the Avenue in her motor.
She greeted me politely, without enthusiasm, but with due regard to the fact that I was a wounded hero home from the wars. Talking of the invasion of Rumania, she showed herself much more alive to America’s international duty than any of the few men I had met since my landing.
