"No." She was looking up at him a little wistfully. "We know each other too well to have to drag in a lot of people, don't we? It is the men whom women trust with whom they go alone."
He met her glance gravely. "Do you know," he said, "that you have the sweetest way of putting things? A man simply has to come up to your expectations. He'd as soon think of disappointing a baby as of disappointing you."
His selection of a simile was unfortunate. Mrs. Beale's eyes became fixed upon a refractory button of her glove.
"Please help me," she said; "your fingers are stronger," and as he bent above her hand she forgot the baby, forgot her new estate, forgot everything except the joy she felt at having his smooth gray head so close to her own.
When he had her safely beside him in his big car he asked, "What made you run away from me in Chicago?"
"I can't quite think of you with a grown daughter."
"Cecily's a darling." Mrs. Beale's voice held no enthusiasm.
Landry, noting her tone, looked faintly surprised. "You and she must have great good times together."
Mrs. Beale wished that he wouldn't talk about Cecily. Cecily had married before good times were possible. They had never played together--she and the little daughter for whom she had toiled and sacrificed.
Landry's voice broke in upon her meditations: "I should like to meet Cecily."
Mrs. Beale switched him away from the topic expeditiously. He should not see her as yet in the bosom of her family. _He should not_. He should not see Cecily with her air of mature motherliness. He should not see Victor, Cecily's husband, who was ten years older than Cecily and only ten years younger than herself. He should not hear her big son Bob call her "Grandma." He should not gaze upon the pretty deference of Bob's little wife toward the queen-dowager!
Dining later opposite Landry in a great golden palace, Cissy seemed like some gay tropical bird. In her new and lovely clothes she was very pretty, very witty, almost girlishly charming. Yet Landry was conscious of a vague feeling of disappointment. She had been more serenely satisfying in Chicago--not so brilliantly hard, not so persistently vivacious. How could he know that the change was one of desperation? Cissy, as grandmother, felt that she must prove, even to herself, that she was not yet a back number.