know it's about our only way of really protecting her from any annoyance
here, even that of thoughts of her own she doesn't like. There will be
so very wonderfully much for her to see, and I believe she'll enjoy it.
One of Lorraine's younger sisters is coming to be with us, perhaps, for
a while in Switzerland--and the Elliots--animal sculptors. You remember
them, don't you, and Arlington--studying decorative design that winter
when you were in New York? They'll be abroad this summer. I believe
we'll all have a very charming, care-free time walking and sketching and
working--a time really so much more charming for a lovely and sensible
young woman than sitting in a talking town subject to the incursions of
a lover she doesn't truly like." He stopped a moment before he added,
sincerely: "Then--it isn't simply for her that this way would be better,
mother, but for me, for every one."

"For you and for every one?" I managed to make myself ask with
tranquillity.

"Yes. Why wouldn't this relieve immensely all the sufferers from my
commercial career at the factory? Don't you think that's somewhat
unjust, not simply to Maria's and Tom's requirements for the family
standing and fortunes"--he laughed a moment--"but to father's need there
of a right-hand business man?" That was his way of putting it. "For a
long time," he pursued, more earnestly than I've ever heard him speak
before in his life, "I've been planning, mother, to go away to study and
to sketch. I'm doing nothing here. Maybe what I would do away from
here might not seem to you so wonderful. But it would have one
dignity--whatever else it were or were not, it would be my own."

Perhaps it may seem strange, but in those few words and instants, when
my son spoke so simply and sincerely of his own work, I felt, more than
in his actual wedding with his wife, the cleaving pang of a marriage for
him. At the same time I was stricken beyond all possible speech by my
rising consciousness of the injustice of his sense of failure here in
his own father's house, in my house. How weakly I had been lost in the
thousand little anxieties and preoccupations of my every-day, to let
myself be unwittingly engulfed in his older sister's strange, blank
prejudice, to lose my own true understanding of the rights and the
happiness of one of the children--I can think it, all unspoken and in
silence--somehow most my own.

It seemed as though my heartstrings tightened. Everything blurred
bef