been able to get his friendship; he's always had a latent
distrust of me--or something like distrust--and perhaps that's made me
sometimes a little awkward and diffident with him. I think it may be
he felt from the first that I cared a great deal about you, and he
naturally resented it. I think perhaps he felt this even during all the
time when I was so careful--at least I thought I was--not to show, even
to you, how immensely I did care. And he may have feared that you were
thinking too much about me--even when you weren't and only liked me as
an old friend. It's perfectly comprehensible to me, also, that at his
age one gets excited about gossip. Dear Isabel, what I'm trying to
get at, in my confused way, is that you and I don't care about this
nonsensical gossip, ourselves, at all. Yesterday I thought the time had
come when I could ask you to marry me, and you were dear enough to tell
me "sometime it might come to that." Well, you and I, left to ourselves,
and knowing what we have been and what we are, we'd pay as much
attention to "talk" as we would to any other kind of old cats' mewing!
We'd not be very apt to let such things keep us from the plenty of life
we have left to us for making up to ourselves for old unhappinesses and
mistakes. But now we're faced with--not the slander and not our own
fear of it, because we haven't any, but someone else's fear of it--your
son's. And, oh, dearest woman in the world, I know what your son is to
you, and it frightens me! Let me explain a little: I don't think he'll
change--at twenty-one or twenty-two so many things appear solid and
permanent and terrible which forty sees are nothing but disappearing
miasma. Forty can't tell twenty about this; that's the pity of it!
Twenty can find out only by getting to be forty. And so we come to this,
dear: Will you live your own life your way, or George's way? I'm going
a little further, because it would be fatal not to be wholly frank
now. George will act toward you only as your long worship of him, your
sacrifices--all the unseen little ones every day since he was born--will
make him act. Dear, it breaks my heart for you, but what you have to
oppose now is the history of your own selfless and perfect motherhood. I
remember saying once that what you worshipped in your son was the angel
you saw in him--and I still believe that is true of every mother. But in
a mother's worship she may not see that the Will in her son should not
always be off