“That’s Syd’s job. He is going to make formal application for my hand. He can get off a thing like that, without batting an eye, when he’s just dying to get out and yell. And the worst of it is, mamma’ll take it in dead earnest. I suppose Sylvia will have sarcastic things to say. I don’t care. Syd never was really in love with her--after he was old enough to cut his eye teeth.”
Mrs. Penrose did not come home for the wedding. Just what she wrote her mother, the other members of the family never knew. Her letter came with another, which bore the Bromfield postmark, and the two were on Lavinia’s plate when she came down to breakfast. David and the girls were already at the table, and Theo had inspected the mail. Drusilla had been instructed not to take letters from the box, and the sight of two thick envelopes threw Lavinia into a nervous chill. She picked them up and carried them to the sun room, saying she had a headache and would eat nothing.
After a little, David followed her, distressed. “Is there anything wrong in Bromfield--at your brother’s house, or with my people?”
“There’s nothing the matter in Bromfield. Sylvia is a cat!”
When school closed in June, Judith took Theodora for the long promised visit to New York. Sydney and Eileen were off for a belated honeymoon in the mountains of Colorado, and Lavinia Trench reflected that the coveted privacy had come at the crucial moment. She would be alone to think things out. David was away from home much of the time, and when he was in the house his wife was only mechanically conscious of his presence. She viewed the neighbours as through a mist. Orders were given to Drusilla, with the monotonous intonation of a talking machine. That the orders were rational was evidence of the complete detachment that could enable her mind to function without conscious effort. It was as if she had wound up the machinery of her being and had withdrawn, leaving it to the old familiar routine.
After three weeks, her cloistered retreat was invaded by the most disturbing member of her family. The passionate devotion that had centered in her youngest-born--to her purblind vision the most perfect copy of herself--had undergone insidious change, as she centered her interest in Eileen. Theodora was irritating beyond endurance. With the child in the house, there could be no peace. Reluctantly, almost bitterly, she came back to the dull reality of life. David was still in Jacksonville from Monday to Saturday. After a day or two, she consented to let Theo stay with Dr. Schubert and Nanny. To her daughter-in-law she confessed that it was not because the old doctor was so lonely, but that she could not endure the child’s incessant chatter. The dropping of a fork behind her chair would send her into a paroxysm of shaking--Lavinia, who had always laughed at nervous women.